Admonition and the Academy:
Installation, Video, and Performance Art in Reform Era China
By
Karin Grace Oen
M.A. Modem Art History, Connoisseurship, and the History of the Art Market
Christie's Education New York, 2001
B.A. Urban Studies
Stanford University, 2000
SUBMITTED TO THE DEPARTMENT OF ARCHITECTURE IN PARTIAL
FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY IN HISTORY, THEORY, AND CRITICISM OF
ART AND ARCHITECTURE
AT THE
MASSACHUSETTS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY
SEPTEMBER 2012
02012 Karin Grace Oen. All Rights Reserved.
The author hereby grants MIT permission to reproduce
and to distribute publicly paper and electronic copies of this
thesis document in whole or in part in any medium now
known or hereafter created.
Signature of Author:
Department of Architecture
/
Certified by:
'August
10, 2012
6
Caroline A. Jones
Professor of History, Theory, and Criticism of Art
Thesis Supervisor
Accepted by:
Takehiko Nagakura
Associate Professor of Design and Computation
Chairman, Committee for Graduate Students
1
Dissertation Committee
Caroline A Jones, PhD
Professor of History, Theory and Criticism of Art
Chair
Arindam Dutta, PhD
Associate Professor of History, Theory, and Criticism of Architecture
Qianshen Bai, PhD
Associate Professor of Art History, Boston University
2
Admonition and the Academy:
Installation, Video, and Performance Art in Reform Era China
By
Karin Grace Oen
Submitted to the Department of Architecture on August 10, 2012 in partial fulfillment of
the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in History, Theory, and
Criticism of Art and Architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Abstract
China's Reform Era (1978-present) has seen the reinvigoration of academic, and artistic
practice, and a rapprochement between the Chinese Communist Party and the
intellectual elite. At its beginnings in the early- to mid-1980s the new availability of
foreign texts and media led to Culture Fever, a widespread phenomenon throughout the
intellectual and artistic spheres characterized by enthusiasm for the philosophy, literature,
and art of the West and pre-Communist China and the simultaneous uptake of discrete
Western and Confucian philosophies. These discussions often addressed modernity and
modernism in China, a crucial homology to early twentieth century Chinese negotiations
in literature and the arts and the development of an amalgamated "Chinese modernism"
comprised of elements of both Confucian and Western philosophy and aesthetics.
As this dissertation argues, key early experimental works of the Reform Era by Zhang
Peili, Wu Shanzhuan, and Zhang Huan reveal a proclivity for subtle and indirect
admonitory messages about China's socio-political climate - a contemporary inhabitation
of the traditional elite scholar-artist and his obligation to criticize immoral or unjust
policies or actions. This admonitory practice was built by artists educated in elite
academies (specifically, the Central Academy of Fine Art in Beijing and the Zhejiang
Academy of Fine Art in Hangzhou) yet utilized completely new and non-academic media.
What this thesis terms as an "art of admonition" utilized traditional tropes, including
direct remonstrations of officials, withdrawal from official life in protest, and the concept
of the "middle hermit" - a scholar who admonishes official policy subtly and indirectly.
The experimental practices of artists after their graduation from elite academies stemmed
from the extra-curricular resources made available to them, especially the schools'
libraries. The connection of these unofficial works to the official academies, their
validation by art market success, and the subsequent official endorsement accorded to
these and other artists in the later Reform Era blurs the distinctions between official and
unofficial artistic practice in China, suggesting a strong endorsement of the dissident
artist's role as "middle hermit."
Thesis Supervisor: Caroline A. Jones
Title: Professor of the History of Art
3
Preface
As with many scholarly works that deal with Chinese people, places, concepts, and
Chinese language materials, this dissertation employs romanization with some
inconsistencies. In general I have implemented the Hanyu Pinyin romanization system.
Exceptions occur in the cases of some place names, personal names (especially of
historical figures), and certain nouns that are recognizable in English in their older
romanized forms, for example "tai chi" instead of "taji" and "Confucius" instead of
"Kong Fuzi." I have endeavored to refer to scholars and artists with Chinese names per
their own convention, with many following the Chinese order that places the family name
before the personal name, but some following the Western order that places the family
name last. I have provided the Chinese characters at the initial mention of important
translated concepts and Chinese language publication titles for reference purposes.
KGO
4
Acknowledgements
My interest in modem and contemporary Chinese art pre-dates this dissertation, but the
form that this interest has taken is the result of the rich academic environment at MIT's
History, Theory, and Criticism (HTC)section of the Department of Architecture. I
would particularly like to thank my intrepid advisor, Caroline A.Jones, whose questions,
challenges, and comments have pushed my work into unexpected and fruitful directions,
and whose unwavering support has been an invaluable asset throughout my time at
HTC. I owe special thanks to Qanshen Bai, a dedicated committee member who has
helped form my understanding of the relationship between Chinese art and history who's
insights first helped me to articulate the theme of admonition as an important component
of Reform Era art. Thanks also to Arindam Dutta for his kind support and his help in
shaping my particular take on examining institutions and the individuals that shape them.
The faculty at HTC have provided intellectual leadership while forming a kind and
dedicated community of scholars, and I thank them all, particularly Nasser Rabbat, Mark
Jarzombek, David Friedman, Kristel Smentek, and Erika Naginski. The students at
HTC are a formidable cohort, and it has been a pleasure learning from and with them
over the years. Jordan Kauffman, Ben Matteson, Christian Hedrick, and Razan Francis
have been especially integral to the completion of this work. My "elders," includingJohn
L6pez, Fabiola L6pez-Duran, Michael Osman, Winnie Wong, and Azra Aksamija have
been extremely helpful as I charted my path through the dissertation process, as have my
contemporaries: Anneka Lenssen, Iris Moon, Rebecca Uchill, Ana Maria Le6n, Nicola
Pezolet, Alla Vronskaya, Deniz Turker, Ila Sheren, Shiben Banerji, Sebastian Schmidt,
Michael Kubo, Niko Vicario and Igor Demchenko. Special thanks also to Stephanie
Tuerk for our valuable and productive epistemological discussions. All the work at HTC
is done with the support of Kate Brearley, Anne Deveau, and Renee Caso, and to them I
offer my sincere gratitude. Outside of HTC, I have benefited from the support of many
dedicated scholars, including Cole Roskam, Midori Oka, Ray Williams, and Ding
Yuhua.
My archival research was made possible with the help of many. I would especially like to
thank Anthony Yung and Linda Lee at the Asia Art Archive in Hong Kong, as well as
Prof. Gao Shiming at the China Art Academy in Hangzhou. Taliesin Thomas at AW
Asia in New York has been a valuable resource, colleague, and friend, and our
conversations about specific artists and the state of the Chinese art market has been of
enormous help. I would also like to thank the HTC, MIT's Department of Architecture,
MIT-China, and the MIT Center for International Studies for the financial support that
made my research possible. Zhang Peili has been enormously gracious and helpful, as
has Ethan Cohen, who first encouraged my interest in the rich period of Reform Era
China.
My profound thanks to my friends and family whose encouragement and support has
made my work possible, and I dedicate this dissertation to them, writ large.
Boston, August, 2012
5
Table of Contents
Chapter 1
8
The Reform Era, the Market, and the Cultural Antecedents of Admonition
Art by the numbers: early experimental installation, video,
and performance art in the Reform Era
Modernism and the Reform Era: The BureaucraticSyle of Work Must be Dropped
Admonition and Chinese Art
And now, a word from the Contemporary Chinese Art Market
The Estella Collection and the Global Craze for Contemporary Chinese
Oil Painting
Dissent and the Artist in Contemporary China
8
Chapter 2
42
12
24
28
33
38
Eremites, Hermeneutics, Alienation, and Art Academies in the Twentieth Century
Art Academies in China
45
The Education Sector, Scholar-Artists and the State:
50
Prolegomena to a Semi-Autonomous Intellectual Sphere in Reform Era China
New Culture Movement Policies and Prescriptions
55
College Students of the Nanjing Decade and their imprint on the 1980s
57
Artistic and Intellectual Autonomy in the Semi/Public Sphere of the 1980s
66
The Chinese Artists' Association and Art in the Official Sphere
71
The Pond Society and experimentation in local niches
73
Eremitic Participation in the Semi-Official Art World
75
Chapter 3
79
Academic Media in Modern China, the Art Academy in the People's Republic,
and Wu Shanzhuan's Installations
Fairyland, Woodcuts, and the Avant-Garde in the 1930s
Mao's Talks at Yan'an and Art Academies in the People's Republic
The Academy in the Visual Chaos of the Cultural Revolution
Zheng Shengtian and ZAFA in the 1980s
75% Red
Red Humor
Installation and the novelty of new media
82
92
97
102
109
120
129
6
Table of Contents (cont'd)
Chapter 4
132
Cultural Fevers in the Reform Era, New Media Broadcasting, and Zhang Peili's Video Art
Philosophical Overtones and The Pond Society
30x30
TV Broadcasting and Video Art in China
River Elegy and the Media Landscape of the late 1980s
136
146
151
155
Chapter 5
Performance Art and the Enactment of Admonition
160
Xingweiyishu, Performance Art and Behavior Art
Formation and Education
The Beijing East Village (1992-1994)
Eremitic Withdrawal and the Persistence of "real beauty"
161
166
170
177
Chapter 6
The Ends of Admonition
179
The Formation of an Activist-Artist
Installations and Incarcerations
184
189
Appendix - Key Terms in Twentieth Century Chinese History
200
Bibliography
201
7
Chapter 1
The Reform Era, the Market, and the Cultural Antecedents of
Admonition
Art by the numbers: early experimental installation, video, and
performance art in the Reform Era
Wu Shanzhuan's installation entitled 75% Red 20% White, 5% Black'(1985),
Zhang Peili's video entitled 30x30 (1988), and Zhang Huan's performance entitled 12
Square Meters (1994) are all examples of artistic experimentation with non-traditional
media in the years immediately preceding and following the crackdown on student
protests in Tiananmen Square onJune 4, 1989. Intriguingly, each artist chose nondescriptive, cryptic, mathematical titles to enforce an abstract and conceptual vocabulary
on their otherwise highly various projects. For Wu, installation was the chosen medium:
in a large room of a defunct Buddhist temple, large, square, red painted canvases bearing
images of bold, black characters of various sizes and the yin-yang symbol in black and
white were casually propped up against the walls with painted circular medallions
arranged on the floor. For Zhang Peili, it was video: a painfully long, continuous shot
that was edited to appear to last for the entire length of the two-hour videocassette,
documenting a piece of mirrored glass measuring 30" by 30" that was dropped and
shattered, then painstakingly reassembled by anonymous white-gloved hands, then
broken again. For Zhang Huan, it was a performance that survives only as photographic
evidence by the artist Rong Rong. Zhang Huan sat for one hour in a village public toilet
This work, while primarily attributed to Wu Shanzhuan, was a collaboration with his colleagues Huang
Jian, Lu Haizhou, Luo Xianyue, Ni Haifeng, Song Chenghua and Zhang Haizhou.
A
on a hot summer afternoon, covered with honey and fish sauce to help attract the flies
that landed on him and bit him for the duration of the event.
How did these media and these abstruse and dissident messages evolve from an
artistic milieu where, in theory, policies that art must serve the nation's political and
economic goals dictated the terms and conditions of creation? What are the resonances
between these mediatic experimentations and the evolution of non-traditional art media
in the West? Perhaps most crucial for the specific history of art in China, what if any are
the connections between these art practices and the history of art in China prior to the
establishment of the art academy system in the early twentieth century? Although the
three works mentioned above bear no visual resemblance to each other, they are united
by their subtle absurdity and their reliance on photo-based documentation. This crucial
homology allowed these pieces to pass from the relative obscurity of their creation,
witnessed first-hand by a small cohort of artist-colleagues, into the canon of Chinese
contemporary art by Chinese and Western art historians, aided by the artists themselves.
These works are also linked by the experimental circumstances of their creation in
the Reform Era by artists who had recently graduated from China's elite fine art
academies with majors in oil painting. This program of study had long been linked to
Socialist Realism, the style officially endorsed by the Chinese Communist Party since the
1940s, taught in the academy via a traditional Beaux-Arts-influenced curriculum that had
been standard since the inception of these art academies in the Republican era (1910s
and 1920s). While studying at the Zhejiang Academy of Fine Art in Hangzhou 2 (Wu
2 As evidence that all Chinese art academies have undergone organizational, programmatic, and name
changes over the course of the twentieth century, the former Zhejiang Academy of Fine Art, previously the
Hangzhou National College of Art, is now called the China Academy of Art (honguo Meishu Xuguan). This
q
Shanzhuan and Zhang Peili) and the Central Academy of Fine Art in Beijing (Zhang
Huan), these three artists all immersed themselves in the resources that were made
available to them by the academy, especially the academy libraries that housed otherwise
unavailable Western art books andjournals. While many of their classmates with
similarly "avant-garde" leanings worked to develop new styles of oil painting (Cynical
Realism, Political Pop), these three artists along with others formed distinct cohorts
interested in new media experimentation, abandoning oil painting altogether. Upon
graduation, all three artists definitively shifted their line of artistic inquiry from painting to
non-traditional media, practices that were already thirty years old by international art
world standards but entirely unprecedented in China. Their turn from painting brought
their artistic practice more in line with their global contemporaries, and my study will
reveal the ways in which a strategic deployment of foreign reception enabled the eventual
success of their work in China. If their use of Western models made their work instantly
readable in a globalized art world, their practices remained distinctly particular to their
own historical-epistemological conditions, namely to their specific attempt to re-negotiate
the concept of modernity that had been previously forged in the early twentieth century
as a hybrid of Western and Chinese painting techniques. Rather than simply "belated"
variations on established Western contemporary art practices, these artworks press us to
examine the institutional conditions that encouraged individual and generational
experimentation among Reform Era artists, yielding the turn to new media as semiautonomous aesthetic and philosophical investigations.
name change occurred in 1993, but for the purposes of this study, the academy will mostly be referred to by
its name in the early Reform Era: the Zhejiang Academy of Fine Art or ZAFA.
10
As political and cultural liberalization ebbed and flowed throughout the Reform
Era, artistic freedom was alternately encouraged and reigned in, but by no means was the
official art commissioned by the Chinese Communist Party's propaganda department the
only art that was allowed to be created without reproach. The pluralistic flowering of
artistic practice in the Reform Era is part of the general intellectual exploration in China
at this time, an exploration that relied heavily on a rigorous discussion of the concepts of
modernity, modernization, and modernism. Overall, the cultural climate of the Reform
Era encouraged a re-negotiation of concepts of nationalism and modernism. The work of
Wu Shanzhuan, Zhang Peili, and their colleagues remained on the fringes of the official
art world in the 1980s. This dissertation is predicated upon the fact that while at times
this work drew censure or censorship from Party representatives, by and large it was not
strictly supervised or routinely criticized, suggesting continuity with traditional
admonitory practices and their capacity to be sustained by elite sub-groups within society.
Large-scale unofficial exhibitions and artist-generated publications were produced
and circulated without incident throughout the mid- and late-1980s, culminating with the
high-profile "China Avant-Garde" show at the National Gallery in Beijing in early 1989.
As this work became more and more public, there were instances of censorship and
criticism. For example, "China Avant-Garde" was temporarily closed, following Xiao
Lu's performance involving her shooting her own installation work at the opening. These
instances were not unprecedented, since Deng Xiaoping's official art policy was in many
ways a carry-over of Mao Zedong's dictate that cultural work must service political goals,
and that art must serve the people and socialism.
11
Modernism and the Reform Era:
The Bureaucratic Style of Work Must be Dropped
Avant-garde (qianfeng
AiW)
Chinese art in the Reform Era (1978-present) has
been a study of an elusive Modernism (xiandaizhuyi, JA
i3.
Modernism, purposely
spelled in this case with a capital "M", presents a special set of quandaries in China, as it
addresses discursive concepts that soundly resonated with diverse circumstances across
broad swaths of history. In his 1997 work Pictures and Visualiy in Earl Moder China,
historian of Chinese art Craig Clunas presented a self-described "tendentious argument"
that similarly "Modern" art making and art buying occurred in 17h century Rome,
Amsterdam, Nanjing, and Yangzhou. This Modernism was based on the artists'
production of discrete, moveable, saleable art commodities and the collectors' assignation
of cultural and monetary value to works of art based on their authenticity and attribution
to a particular, nameable artist. Clunas thus provokes a transcultural understanding of
the Modern with respect to purpose, scale, and medium, situating Modernism in the
offices of precocious seventeenth century capitalists around the globe. This location of the
"Early Modern" in the late Ming dynasty might seem somewhat farfetched with respect
to the specific set of technological, historical and economic factors that gave rise to the
specific artistic movements in Europe that are considered at the heart of high Modernism.
Be that as it may, this broad, elastic definition of the modern is key to developing an
understanding of modernism in late twentieth century China. It is the artistic resonances
with the revived Confucian practice of considered critique and admonition that stand out
as instances of a particularly Chinese modernism, and antecedents of this practice in
3 Craig Clunas, Pictures and Visualiy in Early Modern China (Princeton, NJ.: Princeton University Press, 1997),
13.
12
imperial China reveal an Early Modem tendency toward indirect but powerfully-felt
criticism from the patriotic and dissident elite.
The Reform Era saw a thorough discussion of modernity (xiandaixing 4Ai) as
well as modernism (xiandaizhuyi) in Chinese intellectual circles. The concept of modernity
as it was addressed in intellectual circles in the 1980s and 1990s might seem a belated one
that requires revisiting issues related to Westernization and modernization that surfaced
in the late nineteenth century during the Self Strengthening Movement (1861-late 1890s)
and the early twentieth century during the New Culture Movement (1910s-1920s). A
large contingent of literary and philosophical scholars from the early twentieth century
were concerned with Enlightenment-era Western philosophy. For these scholars, dubbed
neo-rationalists, the "modernity" of Reform Era China lay in the general pluralization of
the intellectual realm and the re-introduction of philosophy and science in addition to
Maoist theory that had dominated all public discourse during the Cultural Revolution. 4
These neo-rationalists, including Chen Kuide, Gan Yang, and Zhou Guoping, came of
age in the mid-twentieth century and were educated before the Cultural Revolution
(1966-1976). They advocated generalized reform and modernization within the
dominant Maoist-Marxist cultural paradigm.
Theoretically aligned with early Western modern tendencies painted with a
broad brush including optimistic humanism, these neo-rationalist intellectuals were
united in their general orientation towards scientific reason and rationality. The
epistemological turn that Chen Kuide and his colleagues advocated was thus not terribly
radical, but an orientation toward pluralism of any kind after the totalitarian regime of
4 Min Lin and Maria Galikowski. The Search for Modernity: Chinese Intellectuals and Cultural Discourse
in the Post-Mao Era (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1999), 14.
13
Mao was significant. Official tolerance of this type of pluralism and the emergence of a
cohort of public intellectuals in the 1980s implied the tacit acceptance and even
encouragement of a revival of the Chinese literati class. This class was traditionally
comprised of generalists who were equally comfortable discussing economic, social, and
political issues as well as supervising education of the next generation of scholars and
practicing literary arts and poetry. These historical public intellectuals also had a moral
obligation to initiate reforms by criticizing officials who strayed from Confucian ideals.
The re-emergence of this class in the public sphere during the post-Mao Reform Era was
contained within the confines one-party political system, but the moral obligation
remained.
Clunas' conception of modernity thus becomes useful when one considers that the
re-emergence of the public intellectual occurred in the context of the wide-reaching
economic reforms of the 1980s and the growth of a market economy. The fact that the
art academies had re-emerged with the nation's economic reforms as a backdrop was a
clear sign that China might soon see a renewal of Clunas' "modern," salable art
commodities, attributable to a named artist instead of the large-scale publicly
commissioned art works that had dominated the previous decades. This re-emergence of
the artist-individual, as opposed to the socialist artist-worker, is a key component of the
modern intellectual sphere and the admonitory culture that this thesis addresses. The
Neo-rationalists and other Reform Era humanities scholars were the product of twentieth
century Chinese university education, and didn't boast the same amateur facility with art
as their literati counterparts had. This is a crucial difference that highlights the fact that
Chinese Reform Era artists were a special subset of the general class of public intellectuals
that began to re-inhabit the role of the critical scholar-official at this time.
14
Neo-rationalist intellectual explorations were not directly related to politics and
policy-making and thus allowed a considerable amount of latitude to discuss hypothetical
and theoretical circumstances. Their discussions came to revolve around discussions of
individual subjectivity, morality, and hermeneutics of truth and beauty.' The Neorationalists were the closest group to a senior intellectual establishment in Reform Era
China, and they were soon challenged and sidestepped by younger, more radicallyoriented, iconoclastic scholars and writers, including Liu Xiaobo, Bei Dao, and Xu Xing
as well as artists like Wu Shanzhuan, Zhang Peili, and Zhang Huan. These iconoclasts
were also interested in Western philosophy, but they skipped over Enlightenment
rationalism in favor of more contemporary intellectual movements: Existentialist thought
and Post-modern philosophy. The simultaneity of uptake of these historically discrete
Western philosophies is characteristic of the Reform Era. Importantly, experimentation
in artistic medium and literary genre was a key manifestation of the general dissatisfaction
with the limited nature of "reform" in the Reform Era. In the case of new media in art,
the turn away from experimentation in oil painting, itself a rich field, was a significant
denial of the status quo and the official educational system that had shaped these young
artists.
The work that is at the heart of this dissertation project, namely, the installations
of Wu Shanzhuan, the video art of Zhang Peili, and the performance work of Zhang
Huan, is decidedly contemporary in form and concept. 6 These works are all oriented
toward a postmodern aesthetic that avoided traditional beauty and courted "anti-art,"
5 Lin and Galikowski. The Searchfor Modernip, 16.
67Te term contemporary is being applied here to indicate the visual synchronicity of these works with
contemporaneous global artistic production although the artists themselves most likely referred to their
work as "modem" (xiandai).
1.5
incorporating mundane imagery and provoking an examination of some of the more
dismal aspects of society.7 It is important to understand these works' form and content as
part of a broader Chinese cultural negotiation of modernity in the wake of the Cultural
Revolution. These negotiations in art, and in the realm of philosophy, literature, film and
music accompanied and encouraged the economic, social, and political reforms of the
Deng Xiaoping andJiang Zemin administrations (1978-1989 and 1989-2002,
respectively). Specifically, it is the role of the artist as a cultural critic and societal
conscience that has come to epitomize new Chinese art on the national and world stage.
This role has profound resonance with the traditional Chinese scholar-artist's
practice of withdrawing from public life and instead creating admonitory works of art that
couch specific political criticisms in ostensibly apolitical works of art. Artists like the Ming
dynasty Zhe School of painters (14th-15th c.) and the Yuan dynasty painter Wu Zhen
(1280-1354) produced work that embodied the artists' dissent. Wu Zhen's work Fisherman
(c. 1350, Metropolitan Museum of Art) is a typical depiction of a scholar-hermit,
unemployed, impoverished, and reclusive due to his falling out of favor with the Yuan
court. The colophone reads:
Red leaves west of the village reflect evening rays
Yellow reeds on a sandy bank cast early moon shadows.
Lightly stirring his oar,
Thinking of returning home,
He puts aside his fishing pole and will catch no more.8
The depiction of the lone fisherman, ostensibly an exiled scholar who chose morality over
a successful career, and his peaceful existence in nature was a recurring trope in these
works. Wu Zhen himself lived as a recluse and without court patronage, which is partly
why he was admired by subsequent generations of painters. DaiJin (1388-1462),
7 Hal Foster, TheAnti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture (Port Townsend, Wash: Bay Press, 1983).
8 "Wu Zhen: Fisherman (1989.363.33)."
16
considered the founder of the Ming dynasty Zhe School, was another painter who lived
without official patronage. Dai's rendering of a lone hermit in Returning Home Through the
Snow (c.1455, Metropolitan Museum of Art) shows the humble underdressed exile in a
similarly peaceful, if more overtly harsh, environment. A close examination of the image
reveals the tattered state of his clothing and the futility of his attempt to shield his face
from the cold with his arm. During the Reform Era, contemporary artists rediscovered
these Chinese artistic practices as well as the highly individualistic and politically aware
Modern masters of Europe and the U.S.
This dissertation will track the epistemological turn that took place in Chinese
intellectual discourse in the 1980s and 1990s that gave rise to the type of visual modernity
steeped with admonishment practiced by Zhang Peili, Zhang Huan, and Wu Shanzhuan.
It is my contention that the intellectual environment at China's top art academies during
the Reform Era specifically fostered the education and development of creative and even
iconoclastic leaders. These art workers, as they had been called under Mao, were
identified as important contributors to the new society and to China's competitiveness in
a global marketplace.' It is important to understand that an atemporal modernity and its
implicit break with an early modem "tradition" are necessary components of the
experimental art practices in China during the 1980s and 1990s.
Deng Xiaoping's 1978 economic reforms and the official program of "thought
emancipation" opened China to previously banned artifacts of Western culture, including
art, literature, history, philosophy, and film, as well as commercial goods, all of which had
9 Bonnie S. McDougall and Mao Zedong, Mao Zedong's "Talks at the Yanan Conference on Literature andArt": A
Translation of the 1943 Text with Commentay, Michigan papers in Chinese studies, no. 39 (Ann Arbor: Center
for Chinese Studies; University of Michigan, 1980).
17
a profound impact on the art academy system. He specifically sought a rapprochement
with the artistic elite, encouraging feedback in the form of thoughtful criticism and
admonishment that would have been unthinkable during the Cultural Revolution. In
1979, Deng Xiaoping greeted the Fourth Congress of Writers and Artists by announcing
his new guiding principles for the arts in the post-Mao era:
Special stress must be laid on the training of talented writers and artists...
Through improved ideological and administrative work, we should create
the necessary conditions for persons of outstanding talent to emerge and
mature.
Party committees at all levels should give good leadership to literary and
art work. Leadership doesn't mean handing out administrative orders
and demanding that literature and art serve immediate, short-range
political goals. It means understanding the special characteristics of
literature and art and the laws of their development and creating
conditions for them to flourish. That is, it means creating conditions that
help writers and artists to improve their skills and to produce fine works
and performances truly worthy of our great people and era. ... The
bureaucraticsyle of work must be dropped. There must be no more issuing of
administrative orders regarding the creation and criticism of literature
and art.'"
Deng's optimism towards positive contributions that the arts could make and the Party's
role in understanding and facilitating the creative arts reflect the relatively liberal
environment that Wu Shanzhuan and Zhang Peili experienced at the Zhejiang Academy
when it was re-opened after the Cultural Revolution. This liberalization did not,
however, change the fundamental tenets of state art policy laid out by Mao Zedong in his
talks on art and literature at Yanan in 1942 whereby art and literature must always be
created to serve the "people." What was revised was a definition of the people as
consisting of more than workers, peasants, and soldiers. Now, "the people" would
10 Deng Xiaoping, "Speech greeting the Fourth Congress of Chinese Writers and Artists, (October 30,
1979)," People's Daily Online, English Edition Web site, accessed 13 October 2009,
http://english.peopledaily.com.cn/dengxp/vol2/text/b350.html. My italics.
18
include some of the educated elite who were no longer to be uniformly condemned for
their bourgeois tendencies.
What Deng offered was not a radical re-configuration of cultural policy, but a
reconciliation with China's own modernist and Republican past as well as certain
elements of Confucian meritocracy and the accompanying admonitory practices. These
long-vilified intellectuals could now find a productive place in Reform Era China as had
their forebears during the May Fourth Movement in the early twentieth century. For
example, the art academies still upheld a conservative curriculum founded in drawing
from plaster casts, but in the early 1980s the academy's plaster busts of Lenin and Marx
were gradually replaced with casts of classical Greek and Roman sculptures more
consistent with those used in academies modeled on the Ecole des Beaux Arts. The life
drawing classes still carried out Socialist Realist exercises in which students visited
factories and farms to draw workers and peasants, but they also began to re-institute
Republican Era practices such as plein air xiesheng (life drawing, 14
.) excursions,
originally instituted by Lin Fengmin in the 1920s. The curriculum was not wide open no curriculum ever is - but the sense of change was palpable.
Throughout the 1980s, there were periodic attempts to reign in some of the
artistic freedoms that Deng's 1979 address had encouraged, including the 1982-1984
Anti-Spiritual Pollution campaign (launched by Cultural Revolution era Party officials,
partially in response to Neo-rationalist discourses on epistemology) that sought to purge
writers and artists exhibiting the "polluting" influences of feudalism and capitalism visible
in the popularity of abstract humanism and "the worship of individualism.""' During this
II Roderick MacFarquhar, The Politics of China- The Eras ofMao and Deng(New York: Cambridge University
Press, 1997), 357-358.
19
period official exhibitions and art periodicals showed only official socialist realist artwork,
reminiscent of the singular standards upheld during the Cultural Revolution." But in
1984, the pendulum swung back again toward the encouragement of liberalization in the
arts.
Deng's 1984 policy shift, which was coupled with the removal of the leftist
gerontocracy of Cultural Revolution-era officials who had launched the Anti-Spiritual
Pollution campaign, was met with understandable skepticism on the part of many selfproclaimed avant-garde artists who had come of age in the late 1970s. Nonetheless,
unofficial artists as a whole welcomed the return to liberalization even if they had to be
tentative about its endurance. This was particularly true after Deng's policies were
matched with new calls for innovation and individualization in the arts by senior artworld figures, many of who were leaders of official artists' organizations in China's
extensive arts bureaucracy. New arts periodicals emerged, and even older official
publications underwent editorial changes, publishing articles on the importance of artistic
freedom and openness to the outside world. These periodicals also promoted new art by
young avant-garde artists that presented a clear challenge to the status quo." The newlyavailable Western and previously banned Chinese texts and media presented a
simultaneous and collapsed view of Modem and Postmodern movements - all of
twentieth century art and theory was bewilderingly present in its reproduced forms. This
period has been described by the artist Xu Bing as one of cerebral overload:
In that particular historical period of the late 70s and early 80s, I read all
kinds of books related to art. I read much like a hungry man eating too
much all of a sudden and who could not digest it all. I wanted to make a
12Julia F. Andrews, "Fragmented Memory - an Introduction," in Julia F. Andrews and Gao Minglu,
FragmentedMemoy: The ChineseAvant-Garde in Exile (Columbus, OH: Wexner Center for the Arts, 1993), 8.
"Ibid., 9.
20
different book, my book, to express my feelings, not difficult theories of
the profound, but focus on an essential topic - the possibilities of
language. That was my feeling, in an artist's way, not as a philosopher
4
who analyzes, but as an artist with true feeling.
Xu's response to the flood of available theory and other source material is simultaneously
a rapprochement with an almost Romantic sensibility that art must be an expression of
"true feeling," and a turn away from popular communication, towards elite culture
production, in the form of an abstract and illegible text, his Bookfrom the Sky (1987). Both
movements are indicative of the experimentation that looked to modernist and traditional
sources in unofficial art circles at the time. Xu's invocation of the Daoist practice of
spirit-writing, a supposed automatic channeling of communications (often admonitions)
from the dead, reveals a strong connection to esoteric and elite Chinese culture as well as
that of the academic West. It is important to understand that this type of overload might
better be understood with respect to the diversity of philosophical movements that gained
traction during the 1980s. Young iconoclastic writers, scholars, and artists were not
necessarily inclined to "digest" and analyze all available Western and Confucian
philosophical schools, but rather to selectively incorporate Franz Kafka, Albert Camus,
andJean-Paul Sartre as well as Chinese sources like Wu Zhen and Daijin into their own
modernist experiments.
InJune 1989, immediately after the crackdown on pro-democracy student
demonstrations in Tiananmen Square, Deng Xiaoping addressed his generals, stating
that the recent protests were a result of, "the confrontation between the Four Cardinal
4
lnterview
I
with Xu Bing in Ying Wang and Sun Yan, Reinventing Tradition in a New World The Arts of Gu
Wenda, Wang Mansheng, Xu Bing andZhang Hongtu (Gettysburg: Gettysburg College, 2004), 31.
21
Principles and bourgeois liberalization,"" indicating that all policies, including those in
the arts, would at least temporarily become more synchronous with the political stance of
the Party's central committee. This tightening of the reins on artistic production did not
have a permanent effect on arts policy or signal a sea change in the creative freedoms of
practicing artists or the academies, however. By 1998, whenJiang Zemin wrote an
inscription for the Central Academy on the occasion of the 80"' anniversary of its
founding, there was no mention of art serving the people or upholding the Four Cardinal
Principles. Rather, the inscription simply reads, "Develop fine arts education to produce
professionals with morals and skills."
Chinese artists' participation in high-profile international art events like the
Venice Biennale (beginning with the 45" Biennale in 1993) and large-scale group
exhibitions in the U.S. and Europe in the mid- and late-1990s helped draw attention to
the artistic production in mainland China during the early Reform Era. Recent events
like the mysterious detention of the artist Ai Weiwei from April throughJune 2011 reveal
how the political system in Reform Era China is neither open nor transparent and the
role of the artist is not that of a critic with carte blanche. Ai, an outspoken detractor of
the government, has used his celebrity abroad and domestically as China's pre-eminent
blogger to draw attention to Chinese governmental offenses. These include the razing of
poor Beijing neighborhoods in order to beautify the city for the 2008 Olympics, and
systematic municipal corruption that led to the building of unsafe school buildings that
collapsed during the 2008 Sichuan Earthquake. Ai's detention and beating reveal a type
of authoritarian governmental intervention that offends the liberal sensibilities of the West
1 Deng Xiaoping, "Address to Officers at the Rank of General and Above in Command of the Troops
Enforcing Martial Law in Beijing (June 9, 1989)," People's Daig,June28, 1989, reprinted in Selected Works of
Deng Xiaoping (1982-1992) (Beijing: Beijing Foreign Languages Press, 1994), 297.
22
and the global art community; it must be taken into account along with the relatively
open and encouraging environment that the avant-garde arts have experienced in China
in the past decade. For example, In an example of municipal largesse unheard of in the
Euro-American art world, Wu Shanzhuan (who was based in Hamburg for most of the
1990s and 2000s) and Zhang Peili (who had gone abroad to New York for brief artist's
residencies in the early 1990s but decided to return each time to his hometown of
Hangzhou instead of expatriating) were awarded their own museums by the local
government of Dujiangyan in Sichuan Province in 2007.16 Also, like institutions of higher
education in the Western world, China's national art academies have embraced their
successful, though somewhat controversial, alumni and recruited them for high-profile
teaching and administrative positions. Zhang Peili was recruited by his alma mater, the
China Academy of Art in Hangzhou, to found China's first department of new media in
2001, a remarkable fusion of the academy with an ostensibly oppositional avant-garde anathema to Western modernism, but explicable within the Chinese context of
admonition and institutional self-correction. Xu Bing was brought back to the Central
Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing in 2008 as its Vice President for International Relations
after spending 18 years working abroad in New York." When questioned about the
possibility of governmental intervention at the academy, Xu replied that, "The old
concept about art and government being at odds has changed. Now artists and the
1'David Barboza, "A Gift Offer for Artists in China: Museums," TheNaw rork Times 25 August 2007,
Accessed 9 May 2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/25/arts/design/25muse.html.
1 David Barboza, "Schooling the Artists' Republic of China," TheN
rork Times 30 March 2008,
Accessed 9 May 2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/30/arts/design/30barb.html?pagewanted=all.
2.3
government are basically the same. All the artists and the government are both running
with development."18
Admonition and Chinese Art
The tradition of Confucian literati criticism of governmental policies, whereby the
educated elite saw it as their right and duty to indicate when the government had strayed
from its moral ideals, extended into the twentieth century during the Republican and
People's Republic eras. Such movements have precedents dating back to to the 4h
century BCE, with many more recent examples of qingyi (pure thought, 3 iL) movements
in the early seventeenth century (late Ming dynasty) and late nineteenth century (late
Qing dynasty).' 9
While the Imperial and Republican period saw intermittent crackdowns
against such communications, by and large this "court of moral judgment"20 allowed for
intellectuals' dissenting opinions to reach high governmental offices through official
channels (van Iu, -S-4)which eventually included Communist Party-controlled
newspapers andjournals. As before, there were significant periods of time when such
criticism was considered unwelcome and unlawful under Mao, especially during the early
18 Ibid The parallels that Xu draws between the ostensibly avant-garde artists and their governmental
counterparts during a time of rapid economic development echo the sentiments of Andy Warhol with
regards to the leveling effect of capitalist mass production that merits quoting here: "What's great about this
country is that America started the tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as
the poorest. You can be watching TV and see Coca-Cola, and you know that the President drinks Coke,
Liz Taylor drinks Coke, and just think, you can drink Coke, too. A Coke is a Coke and no amount of
money can get you a better Coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking. All the Cokes are the
same and all the Cokes are good. Liz Taylor knows it, the President knows it, the bum knows it, and you
know it." (Andy Warhol, The Philosophy ofAndy Warhol: From A to B andBackAgain (New York: Harcourt
Brace Jovanovich, 1975),100-101).
19 Merle Goldman, China'sIntellectuals: Advise andDissent(Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1981),
5-6.
20 Merle Goldman, "The Party and the Intellectuals," in CambridgeHistory of China. 14, Part 1, The People's
Republic. The Emergence ofRevolutionary China, 1949-1965, eds. Roderick Mac Farquhar andJohn King
Fairbank (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 218.
24
1960s and throughout the Cultural Revolution. It was during such closures that midtwentieth century intellectuals turned to the traditions of za wen (W it) - satirical essays,
poetry, and art - that had long served to disguise criticisms and dissent.
Historical examples of politically oriented criticism couched in artwork were often
as simple as a general call to withdraw from official court life, as instanced by the work of
influential Yuan dynasty (1279-1368) landscape painters such as Wu Zhen and Ni Zan
(1301-1374). Wu and Ni were among the Four Masters of the Yuan, a group whose work
transformed the genre of landscape painting by moving away from compositions that
were imitative of nature. Instead, these landscape paintings featured lone human figures
or their iconographic stand-ins (pine trees, bamboo) for educated recluses who had
withdrawn from the corruption of society and politics, derived from the painters'
imaginary contemplations. They were thus considered to be indicative of the scholarartists' emotional state and convictions: the artist's proficiency at employing previous
masters' styles of brushwork revealed his affiliation with the values of previous political
regimes; the compositional elements pine trees, bamboo, rocks, and small thatched huts
symbolized virtues, veiled criticisms, and in some cases commemorated anti-dynastic
gatherings and events. These hermit-landscape paintings were part of a much larger
alternative literati culture that convened in private and shunned the public sphere.
My dissertation takes these paradigms of admonishment as crucial to the
understanding of key reform-era works by Zhang Peili, Wu Shanzhuan, and Zhang Huan.
Artist-made photographs of durational works as in Zhang Huan's stoic performance 12
Square Meters (1994) that took place in an unimproved public toilet, for example,
demonstrate a small elite culture sustaining an artistically driven opposition to the party-
25
state's pretensions to satisfy all public needs. In addition to the undercurrent of
admonishment, such works allow an examination of the reform era trend toward
experimentation in new media art in particular was part of a larger negotiation of xiandai
yishu (modern art, 01,R
) and xiandaizhuyi (modernism) by artists in China in the late
1980s and early 1990s. The term xiandaihuyi was used by artists both to distinguish their
work from Cultural Revolution era Socialist Realism (shehuizhuyi xianshihkuy,
i
C), Maoist Revolutionary Realism (Maozhuyigmingzhe xianshighuyi,
-ii
J-Xi A
$#:#
S SC), and a to reflect the resonance that they felt both with the avant-gardes of
early twentieth century Western Modernism, and with the early twentieth century
Republican-era modernization in Chinese culture. Significantly, the early Chinese
modernization to which they felt an affinity had been fueled by the considered and
careful criticism of the government by the elite intellectual classes.
The revealing linkage with elite admonishment was gradually concealed by a shift
in terminology from the early 1990s onward, when the term xiandaiyishuwas supplanted
by the more globally synchronous phrase dangdaiyishu(contemporary art, :-
#t). A
market had emerged, yielding increased interaction and interdependence between the
Chinese art world and a global art world that exclusively used the term contemporary to
refer to current artistic production. Concomitantly, there was a theoretical distancing
from the modernist projects of both twentieth century Europe and Republican-era China.
My thesis is that these artists' early experimentation with non-traditional media reflect a
personal and generational resonance with the conception of xiandaizhuyi that cannot be
seen as a simple critical opposition to the strict institutional frameworks of the Chinese art
world. Neither can it be seen as a misplaced terminology that was later corrected by a
26
more "contemporary" global art system. Rather, the early tropism toward a modernism
that could be wielded in the Chinese context is informed by their complicated
relationship with the fine art academy system and their understanding of the artist's duty
to produce thoughtful criticism of unjust policies.
This historical form of hidden criticism lodged within elite cultural circles
resurfacing as a possible source for contemporary artwork in China stands in stark
contrast to European models of political messages, historically carried by the stateendorsed and highly public vehicle of history painting. The eighteenth century French
painterJacques-Louis David was able to address pre- and post-Revolutionary political
issues with allegorical paintings such as the Oath of the Horatii (1784, Louvre) and
Intervention of the Sabine Women (1799, Louvre), both of which were viewed by those in
power at high-profile public exhibitions. Wu Zhen, on the other hand, created works like
the Fishermanhandscroll (c. 1350), intended only for private viewing and circulation among
his colleagues. His lone fisherman is composed of a few small brushstrokes, framed by a
steep riverbank and bending pine tree, and the artist's accompanying poem." All of these
symbolic elements would be legible as admonitory only by a member of his educated
literati class and best understood by his own circle of Suzhou scholars. The admonitory
aspect to Wu Zhen's painting is not the rallying cry that David presents to his viewing
public. Instead it is a corroboration of the existence of an elite, inward-facing unofficial
culture sustaining itself in quiet opposition to life at the Imperial court.
21
"Wu Zhen: Fisherman (1989.363.33)."
27
And now, a word from the Contemporary Chinese Art Market
"The artmarket is theplace where, by some secret alchemy, the culturalgood becomes a commodit.
-Raymonde Moulin, The FrenchArt Market: a sociological view
Just prior to the 2011 news about the arrest and detainment of the outspoken
dissident artist Ai Weiwei, the art market information service provider Artprice
announced that the world's art markets had dramatically shifted in 2010. Previously, the
top three nations for art auction revenues were the United States, the United Kingdom,
and France. Suddenly, the first place had gone to China, followed by the U.S. and the
U.K.2 Artwork sold on the secondary market in China is not limited to Chinese art nor is
it primarily contemporary art. In fact the top grossing artists are mostly "Old Masters" (a
European art historical category recently and broadly applied to Chinese art) including
Bada Shanren (1626-1705) and Shen Zhou (1427-1509), and "Modern Masters" (another
recently imported term from European art history) incuding Xu Beihong (1895-1953) and
Li Keran (1907-1989). Still, both the primary and secondary markets for contemporary
Chinese art have become extremely exuberant in the Reform Era, and the impact on
artistic production in Mainland China has been keenly felt. The experimental new media
production of the 1980s can certainly be seen as a response to the rise in a private market
for art, as it existed in the West.
In this context, it is especially interesting to note, in light of the restrictive
governmental views on art and its applications in society under Mao, that towards the
end of the Cultural Revolution, officials turned to contemporary painting as a potential
22
Raymonde Moulin, The French Art Market: a sociological view (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press,
1987), 3, cited in Derrick Chong, "Stakeholder relationships in contemporary art," in Understanding
InternationalArt Markets and Management, edited by Iain Robertson (New York: Routledge, 2005), 91.
23
Miriam Kreinin Souccar, "Art-world power shifts to China," Crain'sNewrorkBusiness.com 27 March 2011,
accessed 8 April 2011, http://www.crainsnewyork.com/article/20110327/SMALLBIZ/30327997 1#.
28
source of revenue. Around 1971, premier Zhou Enlai enlisted traditional guohua artists,
many of whom had suffered greatly as a result of Cultural Revolution policies, asking
them to once again become "art workers" and produce ink paintings for foreign export.
By exporting identifiably Chinese art as a commodity for foreign consumption, Zhou
established a double standard, promoting traditional ink and brush paintings abroad
while maintaining Proletarian Realism and officially sanctioned forms of Chinese folk art
as the only appropriate art for domestic consumption. Later, in the Reform Era, Deng
Xiaoping's policy's of opening to the West have had a profound impact on the art
produced by artists working in China, and creating the conditions for a new kind of art
market, influenced by the global boom in contemporary art and the more recent interest
in "unofficial" oil painting.
The story of Chinese industry in general during the reform era has been one of
planned evolution away from a strictly controlled economy through experimental and
incremental change, from agricultural reforms to the disaggregation of state owned
enterprises and the establishment of private enterprise. The story of the art market is
quite distinct from the trajectory of most industries because the policies of economic
liberalization set in motion under Deng Xiaoping did not call for its reform but rather its
creation. In some ways, its development seems quite the opposite of most other
industries, because it grew from an unofficial network characterized by word-of-mouth
transactions to a centrally regulated industry. Its development, however, is not completely
without comparison in the overall Chinese economic landscape since it developed in a
loose, organic fashion, with entrepreneurial individuals experimenting in creating a
market before their businesses were deemed officially legal.
2q
Discussions of the nascent market for contemporary art in China begin around
the mid to late 1980s, which coincided with the waning power of the State in terms of
content regulation and patronage.
The world of unofficial dissident art had been
opened up in 1979 with the work of the avant-garde collective known as the Stars
(Xingxing 11). The years following their first controversial exhibitions saw the
emergence of a new career path for artists, outside of the state-sponsored art world of
teaching positions and government commissions. 24 These unofficial artists began working
in their own studios or apartments, trying to sell their work without the trappings of a
gallery system through personal connections. They often enlisted the help of foreign
friends to act as agents between the artist and the only viable market for unofficial
dissident art: foreign diplomats and scholars, expatriate residents in China, and tourists. 25
This type of informal art market became so widespread that by December 1989,
according to the China Daily newspaper, there were at least 250 artists in Beijing trying to
sell their work this way. 26 Painters and other visual artists had an unheard of degree of
autonomy, but their careers had a new instability similar to that of artists in the Western
world and faced with their own economic independence they now had to make aesthetic
choices with collectors' tastes in mind. This is not to say that all unofficial art that
emerged in the reform era was commercial in nature, or that commercially successful
unofficial artists were merely pandering to the perceived tastes of foreign (almost
assuredly Western) collectors. Still, the contemporary art that has come to dominate
24
julia F Andrews, Paintersand Politics in the People's Republic of China, 1949-1979 (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1994).
25
Annammajoy andJohn F. Sherry,Jr., "Framing Considerations in the PRC: Creating Value in the
Contemporary Chinese Art Market," Consumption, Markets, and Culture, vol. 7, no.4, (December 2004): 323.
26 Michael Sullivan, "Art in China since 1949," The China Quarterly, No. 159, Special Issue: The People's
Republic of China After 50 Years, September 1999, 717.
30
international auctions is largely oil painting that bears some stylistic similarity to post-War
European and American painting movements and was first collected by non-Chinese
buyers.
It is worth noting that the independent careers forged by painters and other visual
artists at this time were quite distinct from the situations of other cultural workers in the
reform era. The effects of Deng-era economic reforms in other parts of the Chinese arts
and cultural realm led to performing arts troupes, like other bulky state owned enterprises
that were saddled with the costs of salaries, pensions, housing, and medical care, being
revamped with new income streams following the slogan "use commerce to nurture art
(yishangyangwen)."
27
This resulted in hugely unsuccessful diversification, like the Central
Philharmonic Orchestra's attempt to open and operate a restaurant. The result, told by
the Deputy Director Xie Ming in 1986 was that, "Not only have we not made any
money, but we have built up a big pile of problems by doing things sloppily." 28
In the late 1980s, art galleries began to emerge in China's biggest cities, and by
1991, they were made legal, setting in motion the more formalized mechanisms for
exhibiting, pricing and selling works of art. 29 At the same time, the exhibition and sale of
contemporary Chinese oil painting abroad (largely in the U.S.) was encouraged, and a
few galleries in New York began to represent Chinese artists. 30 The most prominent
galleries in China were all foreign-owned and catered to a largely Western clientele: Red
Gate Gallery was opened in Beijing in 1991 by Brian Wallace (an Australian who had
come to Beijing to study Chinese language and art); Courtyard Gallery in Beijing was
27
Richard Curt Kraus, The Party and the Arty in China: the New Politics of Culture (New York: Rowman &
Littlefield
Publishers, Inc., 2004), 24.
28
Ibid,, 23.
29
Joy and Sherry, "Framing Considerations," 323.
30 Michael Sullivan, "Art in China since 1949," 717.
31
opened in 1996 by Chinese American lawyer Handel Lee and managed by the British
curator Karen Smith; and ShanghART gallery was opened in Shanghai in 1994 by
Lorenz Helbling (a Swiss student of Chinese language who had some experience as an art
dealer in Europe).3 1 This time period in the early to mid 1990s was also when
contemporary unofficial Chinese art began to gamer international attention, with
exposure at the Venice Biennale (1993, 1995), the Sao Paulo Biennale (1994, 1996), and
the Asia-Pacific Triennial in Fukuoka (1993, 1996), as well as, toward the late 1990s,
major museum exhibitions in Europe and the United States.
While all of these new developments in the art world contributed to the value
creation in contemporary Chinese oil painting that has culminated in the speculative
international auction market described earlier, the market was not wholly independent of
the Chinese state. The government's role was that of a broker connecting Chinese artists
with foreign collectors. In 1992, following Deng Xiaoping's Southern Tour, the
municipal government of Guangdong province sponsored the First Art Fair in
Guangzhou, inviting foreign dealers and museums to help jump-start a market for
contemporary Chinese artwork. 32 In general, all players looked to the experienced art
professionals from outside of China in order to realize the potential of contemporary
Chinese art as an international commodity. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, however,
the central government began trying to more actively develop the cultural industries
sector with a domestic audience (and market) in mind. In 1998, the Cultural Industries
Bureau, an entity responsible for making and implementing policies related to cultural
31
32
Joy and Sherry, "Framing Considerations."
Ibid., 324.
.32
markets, was established under the Ministry of Culture. 3 3 In 2002, in one of many
examples of official promotion of cultural industries, the report of the Chinese
Communist Party's 161 National Congress stated that, "In the current market economy,
developing the culture industry is a very important way to achieve socialist cultural
prosperity and to meet the spiritual and cultural needs of the people." 34 In other words,
economically self-sustaining art and cultural enterprises in all forms were enthusiastically
encouraged for the benefit of the Chinese people and culture as a whole. This included
both "public" (i.e. municipal and local) institutions analogous to the non-profit art world
in the U.S., and businesses associated with the primary and secondary sale of art objects.
Collecting art was no longer an artifact of bourgeois or reactionary culture, rather it was
part of the network of cultural activities that would help create a new kind of "socialist
cultural prosperity." By all accounts the public taste for art-related industries has indeed
grown over the past six years, as a recent declaration that museums in Beijing and
Shanghai be made free of charge resulted in massive daily attendance and chaotic crowd
scenes. 35
The Estella Collection and the Global Craze for Contemporary Chinese Oil
Painting
The development of the Chinese art market in general and foreign speculation in
contemporary painting is a key component to understanding the critical and lesscommercial works of Zhang Peili, Zhang Huan, and Wu Shanzhuan. While they have all
33
Meiqin Wang, "Confrontation and Complicity: Rethinking Official Art in Contemporary China," (PhD
diss., Binghampton University, State University of New York, 2007), 82.
4 Ibid, 83.
s5 "Mayhem reigns at free-for-all museums," The People's Dail Online, 16 February 2008, accessed 9 May
2008, http://english.people.com.cn/90001/90782/90872/6355294.html; "Beijing Museum Tickets
become popular collector's item," Artron.net 14 April 2008, accessed 29 April 2008,
http://en.artron.net/news/news.php?newid=43639&siteid=1&channelid=21&column_id=.
.33
achieved commercial success, it must be understood that they are much less successful
than their contemporaries who work in more traditional media. An astounding example
of the state of the market came with the aggregation and sale of a the Estella Collection, a
significant collection of contemporary avant-garde oil painting in 2008.
On April 9, 2008, 108 works from this single collection were auctioned at
Sotheby's Hong Kong. This auction, held at a time of uncertainty for Asian stock
markets, had a slightly more sober atmosphere than the standing-room-only auctions of a
year previous.s6 Still, prices of the most sought-after artists' works continued to climb as
they had for the previous five years. 37 The sale of these works, about half of the Estella
collection, totaled $17.8 million, about 150% of the pre-sale high estimate of $12 million.
This sale was just one of Sotheby's spring auctions of contemporary Chinese art in Hong
Kong. The total for all auctions in this category came to $51.7 million, an impressive
sum for the relatively new auction category, but a fairly modest total when compared to
the auction prices of postwar and contemporary American and European artworks - for
example, one 1974 painting by Francis Bacon sold for $51.7 million at Christie's London
in February 2008. But the Estella sale set new auction records for some of China's most
renowned contemporary artists, including the painter Zhang Xiaogang (b. 1958) whose
1995 painting "Bloodline: The Big Family No. 3" sold for over $6 million to a buyer that
Sotheby's identified as a Taiwan born collector living in the U.S.38 This broke the
previous (short-lived) auction record for a contemporary Chinese artist, $5.9 for Yue
Minjun's (b. 1962) 1995 painting "Execution," achieved in Sotheby's London salesroom
36
Le-Min Lim, "Records, Disappointments Mark Sotheby's Auction of Chinese Art," Bloomberg.com, 9
April 2008, accessed
1 May 2008,
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&sid=apHxGEqwy4Eo.
37 "Chinese Art Continues to Soar at Sotheby's," The New rork Times 10 April 2008, Arts/Cultural Desk, 1.
38
Ibid
34
in October 2007. Zhang's record, however, was shattered later that evening when
Sotheby's Hong Kong auctioned off Liu Xiaodong's (b. 1963) "Battlefield Realism: The
18 Arhats" (2004) for $7.9 million. These prices are indicative of the contemporary
Chinese art market, and of the global reach of this formerly small niche market. 39
The phenomenal success of the sale of the first half of the Estella collection is part
of the larger story of the international market for Chinese art, specifically modern and
contemporary art that has attracted attention from all over the art world. It is also a
cautionary tale for many art world players including artists, scholars, and museum
curators, who feel betrayed that the collection, which they had contributed to in thinking
it was being assembled for eventual donation to a museum, was so quickly flipped at such
a hefty profit. It turns out that this collection, formed under the direction of the London
and New York based dealer Michael Goedhuis during the period around 2004-2007, was
the property not of a single collector, but a group of New York investors led by two
executives of Invus Financial Advisors, Ray Debbane and Sacha Lainovic, now chairman
and director, respectively, at WeightWatchers International, Inc. 4 0 These investors
39
To give a sense of how quickly these prices have appreciated, a similar painting by Zhang Xiaogang sold
at Christie's New York in November 2006 for $1.3 million. The original prices paid for these works five to
ten years ago was probably between $10,000-50,000. (David Barboza, "An Auction of New Chinese Art
Leaves Disjointed Noses in Its Wake," The New rork Times, 7 May 2008, Arts/Cultural Desk, 1; Katya
Kazakina and Linda Sandler, "New York Dealer to Sell $12 Million 'Estella' Chinese Art," Bloomberg.com.
28 March 2008, accessed 15 April 2008),
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&sid=a6PZYAYrZgI.
40 Michael Goedhuis is a Dutch-born art dealer educated in economics at Eton College who earned an
MBA from INSEAD. He owns galleries in London and New York, and is known for his openly businessoriented approach to art collecting as a financial investment. Formerly an investment banker in New York,
Goedhuis began his career in the art world at the Rothschild art investment companies after returning to
school to study art history at the Courtauld Institute in London. He began his career as an independent
dealer in 1982, working in antiquities from the Middle East, India, China, andJapan, areas he saw as
undervalued in the art market. In the 1990s he began to work with contemporary Chinese art, opening
Goedhuis Contemporary in London in 1995, and in New York in 2002,just before he began to collect for
the Estella collection.
It should be noted that the Belgian Baron Guy Ullens, a major collector of contemporary Chinese
art and founder of the Ullens Center of Contemporary Art (UCCA) in Beijing, is the president and chief
executive of the Luxembourg-based Artal Group, the parent company of WeightWatchers since 1999.
3.5
embarked upon their project of forming an expansive and comprehensive collection of
contemporary Chinese art in all media beginning with work from the mid- 1990s,
disclosing that they hoped it would be the basis of a comprehensive book. That book
came to pass in 2007 as a hefty 460 page exhibition catalogue entitled China Onward,to
accompany an exhibition of the collection at the Louisiana Museum in Denmark. The
bulk of the catalogue was written by Britta Erickson, one of the foremost scholars of
contemporary Chinese art, with contributions from other prominent figures in the field.
All in all it was a visually lavish, academically grounded tome that served to underscore
the collection's art historical value. The collection was on view in Denmark from March
to August of 2007, then traveled to the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, where it was on view
from September 2007 to early March 2008, closingjust a few weeks before the Hong
Kong auction in April. When Sotheby's announced the sale at the end of March, 2008, it
became apparent that the collection had changed hands in August 2007, when the group
led by Debbane and Lainovic sold the collection to the New York art dealer William
Acquavella for an undisclosed price that art market experts have guessed to be about $25
million and that Goedhuis has described as "hugely profitable for [the] investors."4 1
Acquavella apparently financed the deal in collaboration with Sotheby's, as the auction
house was obliged to disclaim in the Estella collection auction catalog that the company,
Ullens has not been linked to the Estella collection, and indeed he has been quoted as saying, "Our job is to
promote emerging artists. The $2 million canvas is not for us."
(Guy Ullens, quoted in Christina Ruiz, "China gets its first contemporary art museum," TheArt Newspaper,
issue 187, 20 December 2007, accessed 8 May 2008,
http://www.theartnewspaper.com/article.asp?id=7043; "ZoomInfo Web Profile: Michael Goedhuis,"
Zoominfo.com, accessed 9 May 2008,
http://www.zoominfo.com/Search /PersonDetail.aspx?PersonID=80449777; "About the Gallery," &
"Michael Goedhuis," Goedhuis Contemporary Web Site, Goedhuis Contemporary Gallery, accessed 9 May
2008, http://goedhuiscontemporary.com/gallery/.)
41 Barboza, "Artists' Indignation."
.36
"owns, in whole or in part, or has economic interest equivalent to an ownership interest,
2
in all lots in this sale." 4
The announcement of the impending Sotheby's auctions drew cries of outrage
from all corners of the art world who had been touched by the Estella project. The
Louisiana and Israel Museums both expressed dismay that they had not been informed of
the plans to sell the collection, claiming that they would not have exhibited the works had
they known. Dr. Erickson also claims to have been misled about the nature of the
collectors, stating that, "I believed that it was a personal collection being assembled for
43
The bitterest
the long term, with perhaps some pieces to be donated to museums."
sentiments, however, have been expressed by artists whose works were in the collection,
often surrendered to Goedhuis at below-market value in support of the ambitious
collection that they assumed would remain in the public domain. The painter He Sen
said, "Many artists, including me, were convinced by [Goedhuis], gave our best works to
Michael, some even at a relatively cheap price. Then it turned out to be an auction, we
feel sold out by him.""
He also noted that one work that was purchased for the Estella
collection for $60,000 sold at the Hong Kong auction for $200,000. Another artist, Feng
42 Seemingly unaware of the newly exposed irony of the collection's name, Goedhuis disclosed that he
capriciously took the name from the beautiful but heartbreakingly unfeeling female lead character in
Charles Dickens' Great Expectations because "I felt it was a name the Chinese could pronounce... Although
Estella wasn't a pretty character, it's a pretty name," (Michael Goedhuis, quoted in Carol Vogel,
"Contemporary Chinese on Sale in Hong Kong," The Na Tork Times, 28 March 2008, 30); Britta Erickson,
Hou Hanru and Frances Bowles, China Onward: The Estella Collection : Chinese Contemporay Art, 19 66-2006
(Humlebak, Denmark: Louisiana Museum of Modem Art, 2007); Lim,"Records, Disappointments";
"Sotheby's Auctions First Part of Estella Collection.... For $17.8 Million," ArtKnowledge/ews.com 11 April
2008, accessed I May 2008,
http://www.artknowledgenews.com/SothebysHongKongEstellaCollection.html; Erickson, quoted in
Barboza, "Artists' Indignation."
43Barboza, "Disjointed Noses."
44He Sen, quoted in Barboza, "Disjointed Noses."
37
Zhengjie, said plainly, "I feel cheated," noting that his works were auctioned for 5 to 10
times the price paid by Goedhuis.4"
The story of the formation, canonization, and profitable public dismantling of the
Estella collection raises many questions about what, if anything, these art world dealings
in Mainland Chinese art have to do with China itself. The story is global in scope: New
York investors decide to form a collection of art from mainland China, so they engage a
European art world insider to make it happen, American and Chinese scholars to write
about the works, and then they exhibit the collection in Europe and the Middle East
before selling the whole thing to a New York dealer working in collaboration with one of
the world's largest international auction houses. The buyers at the Hong Kong auction,
from what little information is made public, seem to be foreigners and overseas Chinese
residing in the U.S, Southeast Asia, and Hong Kong.0 While the story of the Estella
collection seems to be as much about New York as it is about Beijing, an examination of
the current expansion of the Chinese domestic art market, specifically the auction market,
suggests China will not be left out of the global boom in Chinese art, and begs the
question of how much of a role the market plays in the relationship between artists and
the state.
Dissent and the Artist in Contemporary China
The success of the Chinese contemporary art market over the past ten years has
helped pave the way for drastic changes in that nation's cultural landscape. Beijing and
Shanghai are now home to multiple gallery districts and contemporary art museums.
45
46
Feng Zhengjie, quoted in Barboza, "Artists' Indignation."
"Chinese Art Continues to Soar,"; "Sotheby's Auctions First Part of Estella Collection."
is
The Dashanzi Art District, home to the 798 Art Zone, is China's most conspicuous
example of the thriving contemporary arts economy. This art complex, housed in a
former Soviet-era heavy equipment factory compound in the far northeastern corner of
the city, is now a mix of art galleries, restaurants, design-oriented retail stores, fashion
boutiques, and creative services firms. Beginning with its inhabitation by artists in need
of studio space in the early 2000s, this area has evolved steadily into a mainstream tourist
attraction as more institutional and commercial venues establish themselves. Given the
extremely high profile status of contemporary art in China, especially oil painting, it is
reasonable to wonder whether the upbeat and trendy atmosphere at places like 798 is an
indicator of waning governmental regulation in the arts. And along these lines, is this
relaxation of regulation due to the diminishing power of state cultural organizations in the
face of a new arts infrastructure resulting from an overall societal shift toward an
independent, market-driven culture? As can be seen on a cursory visit to 798 or its
slightly edgier neighbor Caochangdi, or 55 Moganshan Lu in Shanghai, to name a few
places, global contemporary art idioms in all media have been well incorporated into
Chinese art practices. This contemporary art "scene," often defined through the work of
the painters whose works formed the bulk of the Estella Collection, has been celebrated in
the global art world since the 1990s. It has received attention from a sympathetic
international audience largely for its assumed anti-authoritarian message and the
attendant triumph of independent artistic expression in the face of a repressive political
environment. The art historical treatment of this branch of Chinese art is not unlike the
Cold War era celebration of Abstract Expressionist painting as emblematic of liberal
American values.47 This type of unofficial oil painting certainly carries both implicit and
7 For more on this topic, see Serge Guilbaut, How New Tork Stole the Idea of Modern Art: Abstract Expressionism,
explicit criticisms of modern and contemporary China in its style and content. There is a
well-establish international market for oil painting with generalized admonitory content,
but what does this mean for the significant abstract and indirect admonitory work that
was also created during the Reform Era?
In the following chapters, I will argue that a different type of non-explicit critical
messages levied directly at China's intelligentsia and government were couched within
examples of early experimentation in the non-academic art mediums of installation,
video, and performance. This is part of a legacy of critical admonishment that comprised
an integral part of Confucian literati painting - a tradition that was quietly preserved in
China's academic realms despite the clearly anti-Confucian intellectual movements that
dominated intellectual discourse throughout the twentieth century. This Reform Era
artistic experimentation that charted new visual and aesthetic territory was the result of
the discursive intellectual environment of the 1980s, mediated by the curriculum and
extra-curricular resources at the nation's most elite official art academies. It is in these
academies that the legacies of the scholar-literatus-critic and the Modern artist were fused
amidst the strict curriculum designed to teach the technical skills of realist painting
through a combination of Beaux-Arts and Socialist Realist traditions. This is lineage is
crucial not just to understanding the work of Zhang Peili, Wu Shanzhuan, and Zhang
Huan, but to understand that the adoption of new media art in non-Western contexts is
not evidence of a post-modern globalized artistic convergence, but rather of the
conceptual adaptation of cultural specificity. With this in mind one can begin to analyze
how, in contemporary China, despite the massive cultural and economic reforms, there
remains a persistent, tense, and terpsichorean relationship between artists and the state.
Freedom, and the Cold War (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983).
40
Kantian-infused pedagogy and its new relationship to traditional Chinese culture
defined the investigations of modernity and nationalism in China's new academies in the
early twentieth century. The fusing of official political ideology and the
professionalization artistic training redefined the role of the Chinese artist in the midtwentieth century. These are necessary pre-conditions for the purposeful side-stepping of
official art mediums in the 1980s. By exploring the elements of each of these periods at
play in Reform Era cultural policy, I will analyze the meaningful de-coupling of art and
official ideology and the reinsertion of the Chinese artist's role as a cultural critic and
scholar-amateur in early experimental new media work.
41
Chapter 2
Eremites, Hermeneutics, Alienation, and Art Academies in the
Twentieth Century
Xu Bing's statement about the "undigestable" overabundance of informal reading
groups in Reform Era China highlights the hermeneutical role that artists took on while
the nation renegotiated its intellectual sphere with respect to the party-state in the 1980s.
These forums for the discussion and debate of Western and Chinese philosophies
included new journals such as Art Trends (Meishu Sichao, k4%d)A), and revamped
editorial staff for olderjournals, like the appointment of young artists and scholars at Fine
Arts (Meishu,
) published by the official Chinese Artists' Association. Along with the
policy-driven ebbs and flows of intellectual freedom during the 1980s, these societies and
journals' editorial policies reflected an initial sense of hope and optimism followed by a
more critical view of the nation's future. This analytical and often pessimistic stance must
be understood not as an amalgamation of personal viewpoints but as a generational
episteme, eremitic in nature, pedagogically encouraged by the elite academies.
For 1980s intellectuals in the realm of the humanities and sciences, earlier phases
of elite withdrawal from political life and veiled governmental criticism found in Song,
Tang, andJin Dynasty poetry and philosophy were re-imagined, resonating powerfully
with their contemporaneous Deng Era intellectual culture. Art schools, rebuilt in the
post-Cultural Revolution Era, became part of the new academic humanities
infrastructure. Revived along with these institutions were the Chinese traditions of
42
incorporating scholar-artists into the intelligentsia. Examples of artists as close confidants
of political leaders had been found in both imperial and Republican China. Notably, the
Huizong emperor (r. 1101-1126) of the Song dynasty was himself a noted painter and
surrounded himself with literati artist-courtiers like Wang Shen, Chao Ling-jang, and
Chao Shih-lei."8
In early twentieth century Republican China, the Cantonese painter GaoJianfu
(1879-195 1), who considered himself a scholar in the tradition of Confucian literati, was
an active participant in the underground revolutionary efforts of the Alliance Society
(Tongmenghui,
Mj
il),
predecessor of the Guomindang (Kuomintang, KMT) party. This
society, formed in 1905 in Tokyo, was a conglomeration of revolutionary groups
comprised of Chinese students and scholars studying atJapanese universities.4 9 Led by
Sun Yat-sen, these Chinese elites contributed to assassinations and military maneuvers to
overthrow the Qing dynasty in 1911. In the year of the revolution, Gao briefly served as
the military governor of Guangdong province, then resigned his political posts in order to
return to his art work.5 0 Gao's resignation does not fall in the tradition of scholars who
retreat from politics as a form of protest, but rather as a new kind of modern professional
artist who needed to balance his political convictions with his practical career as a painter,
bookseller, and publisher. 51 He was recalled to military duty in the late 1910s and early
48
James Cahill, The LyricJourne:Poetic Paintingin China and apan (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University
Press, 1996), 11.
49
Jerome Ch'en, China and the West: Society and Culture, 1815-1937 (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University
Press, 1979), 307.
50
R alph C. Croizier, Art and Revolution in Modern China: The Lingnan (Cantonese) School ofPainting,1906-1951
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 63.
51 Gao's own education as an artist, prior to the establishment of modern art schools in China, was an
amalgamation of traditional and modem modes. He apprenticed in the painting studio ofJu Lan (18281904), who worked primarily in the bird and flower genre, until 1898, then studied Western painting under
a French artist known by the Chinese name Mai La at Guangdong Christian College in 1903 before
traveling tojapan to study Japanese painting in 1905. (Deborah Nash, "GaoJianfu," In Grove Art Online,
43
1920s to help the Nationalist army retake cities that had been seized by warlords, and
after this service remained politically active in Sun Yat-sen's government as a member of
the Guangdong Industrial Art Commission and the head of the Provincial Industrial
School.52 The example of GaoJianfu is important to young Chinese art students in the
1980s, but not because of the new Chinese painting (xin guohua,
r4
A) style that he
developed by fusing elements of Western andJapanese brushwork and composition with
Chinese ink painting. Instead, his import lies in the versatility of his identity as both an
artist and a politically-active member of the elite intelligentsia that fomented an extreme
act of admonition - the overthrow of the Qing government and the entire Imperial
tradition.
This chapter will explore the important connections between the 20 century
Chinese art academy system founded by Cai Yuanpei, another Nationalist revolutionary
reformer, and the centuries-long Confucian tradition of elite intellectual criticism and
withdrawal from society. The mode of considered criticism that accompanied these
eremitic withdrawals is especially significant with respect to the structural conditions
during two periods: the 1930s, when the first generation that came of age in Republican
China was studying in the institutions of higher learning set up by GaoJianfu, Cai
Yuanpei, and other Nationalist reformers; and the 1980s, when the nation's academies
and universities were re-opened, renovated, and re-imagined amidst sweeping economic
reforms and the national recovery from the extreme trauma of the Cultural Revolution
(1966-1976). It is my contention that the sociological and cultural themes of melancholic
alienation and withdrawal in the 1980s were founded on pre-Cultural Revolution
Oxford Art Online, accessed 5June 2012,
http://www.oxfordartonline.com/subscriber/article/grove/art/T030631.
52 Croizier, Art and Revolution in Modern China, 85.
44
modalities. Withdrawal from political life within the Chinese intelligentsia - in the 1980s
as in the 1930s-
informed the specific type of exploration of admonitory concepts in new
media art that is at the heart of this dissertation. Despite the tenacious persistence of Cai
Yuanpei's Kantian-inspired educational theory in the nation's art academies after their
re-opening in the late 1970s, Chinese artists of the 1980s and 1990s turned to older and
more traditional models of the eremitic scholar-artist to articulate their cultural critiques.
Art Academies in China
As with the colonial enterprises that established academies in Latin America and
India during the 18th and 191 centuries, the art academy system in China was in large
part based on antecedents in Europe. This was so, despite their creation in the early 20h
century, long after the academy's hold on European art had waned. The Chinese
academic curriculum was largely based on a French Beaux-Arts tradition that guided
students through a progressive development of fine arts skills from drawing to painting.
Drawing classes began with studies of plaster casts of classical Greek sculptures, with later
figure-drawing sessions conducted with nude models, although this practice was
controversial and deemed lewd by some government officials. 53 Scholars of Indian art
training have argued all national art academies are important components of nation
building, even in the colonial context, since academies established under colonial rule
often remained fairly intact under the new independent national governments.5 4
5s For more on Liu Haisu and the curricular practices that led to his branding as a "traitor of art," see Julia
F. Andrews, " 'The traitor of art' and Chinese modernity: Liu Haisu and the nude model controversy," in
Images in Exchange, edited by Richard Vinograd (Berkeley, University of California Press, 2003).
54 For discussions of art academies in India, see: Tapati Guha-Thakurta,The Making of a New "Indian"Art:
Artists, Aesthetics and Nationalismin Bengal, c1850-1920 (Cambridge, U.K: Cambridge University Press, 1992);
Tapati Guha-Thakurta, Monuments, Objects, Histories:Institutions ofArt in Colonial and PostcolonialIndia (New
York: Columbia University Press, 2004); Parth a Mitter, Art andNationalismin ColonialIndia, 1850-1922:
45
However, unlike their colonial counterparts that had been established in other countries
during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the art academies in China were
established in various regions by the Nationalist government of the late 19 1Os and early
1920s as a key component of the Republic of China's new educational system, with no
direct tie to a particular European curriculum. As a result, Chinese academies in
Nanjing, Shanghai, and Hangzhou were first founded on the basis of individual
experiences and proclivities of the artists who had traveled to and studied art in Germany,
France, Italy, Belgium, andJapan as part of the Republican government's work-study
abroad program. This being said, there were certain conventions that were common to
all of the art academies. One such practice was the aforementioned copying of plaster
casts. This emphasis on first attaining technical competency and graphic skills is not
particular to Chinese art schools, but it is worth noting that this foundational educational
practice remained consistent despite other ideological changes in academy curriculum.
55
To emphasize, this continuity is visible in the relative unchanged pedagogy during the
transition from the Republican era into the early People's Republic Era. Although the
plaster busts of classical Greek sculptures were replaced with busts of Mao and Lenin in
the 1950s and 1960s, the program in drawing remained virtually unchanged.
To return to the foundation of China's art academy system during the New
Culture Movement of the 1920s, we see that the founders were all painters who had spent
time in European art academies and private ateliers. In Shanghai the artist Liu Haisu,
Occidental Orientations(Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1994); Vinayak Purohit, Sociology ofArt
and Politics (Bombay: Indian Institute of Social Research, 1987); Pushpa Sundar, Patrons and Philistines: Arts
and the State in BritishIndia, 1773-1947 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1995).
55
Kao, Mayching. "Reforms in education and the beginning of the western style painting movement in
China," in A Centuy in Crisis: Moderniy and Traditionin the Art of Twentieth-Century China, ed.Julia F. Andrews
and Kuiyi Shen (New York: Guggenheim Museum, 1998), 149-150.
46
who had studied in Paris, returned to establish the Shanghai Academy of Art as an
educational institution infused with the late-191 century aesthetics of the Impressionists
and the centrality of figure painting. Late-19th century French painting, the
Impressionists, and plein-air landscape painting similarly inspired Lin Fengmian, who
was appointed by Cai Yuanpei as the founding director of the Hangzhou Art Academy in
1928.56 Xu Beihong studied in Germany as well as France, returned to China in 1926,
and in 1927 was asked by Cai to head the art department at the National Central
University in Nanjing. Xu infused that school's curriculum with his love of history
painting and academic realism, tastes that he had cultivated while a student at the
Hochschule fir den Bildende Kiinste, the Academie Julian and the Ecole National
Superieur des Beaux-Arts.5 7 But these stylistic and aesthetic variations on the theme of
European paths to oil painting was only part of a dichotomous educational program that
offered students the opportunity to study either Western painting or Chinese ink painting
in the tradition of the apprenticeship undertaken by GaoJianfu in the late nineteenth
century. One medium in the curriculum, sculpture, was considered so Western in
orientation that there was no "Chinese" path, and the course of study for sculpture
majors was also founded in academic drawing. The discussion of style, medium, and
genre, however, was quite secondary to the establishment of an overall art education
system, given high priority by Cai Yuanpei, the leading educational reformer of
Republican China, as will be explored in depth later in this chapter.
56 Michael Sullivan, Modern ChineseArtists: A BiographicalDictionay (Berkeley: University of California
Press,
2006), 93.
57 Michael Sullivan, Art andArtists of Twentieth-Century China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996),
69.
47
It is worth emphasizing that unlike the colonial academies established as an
extension of the European tradition of fine arts education on other continents, the
Chinese case presents a distinct and unique educational idiom. Cai Yuanpei outlined this
overarching educational initiatives in the visual arts, music, and literature in 1917 when
he spoke publicly on the topic of "Replacing Religion with Aesthetic Education."a5 For
Cai, ".. .religion is invariably constructed as a response to our spiritual functions." 59
These functions could be categorized as knowledge, will, and emotion, all of which had
become intertwined with religion during civilizations' early developmental stages. The
elements of knowledge and will, Cai argued, had separated from religion as societies
developed more sophisticated understandings of the natural world, science, law, and
moral relativism. Emotion alone, he continued, was the realm that remained bonded to
religious thought all over the world, resulting in both positive and negative
manifestations: the beautiful art and architecture that accompanies spaces of religious
devotion and the extended violent conflicts between the devotees of different faiths. Cai's
utopian vision, therefore, was to decouple the negative societal effects of faith-based
emotion by extracting the positive element of aesthetic beauty and making that, rather
than religious philosophy, the cornerstone of modem civic life. He also acknowledged the
gradual separation of art and religion in most societies, and the constraint that religion
places on aesthetics. 60 The Republican societal conversion from religion to an aesthetic
literacy and competency involved the broad implementation of Cai's vision in art
58
Cai Yuanpei, "Replacing Religion with Aesthetic Eduction," in Modern Chinese Literary Thought: Writings on
Literature,1893-1945, ed. Kirk A. Denton (Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press, 1996), 182.
59
Ibid. 183
60 "After the Renaissance, all forms of art gradually separated from religion and instead valued humanism.
Today, therefore, the most magnificent architecture may be found in schools, theaters, and museums,
whereas newly constructed churches with aesthetic merit are almost nonexistent. Other kinds of art often
take their subjects from natural phenomena or social conditions," (Cai Yuanpei, "Replacing Religion,"
185).
48
education as a key component of all Chinese schools. This, in turn, necessitated the
training of a significant number of art teachers to staff these positions. China's art
academies were thus not simply the institutions that would train the nation's fine artists or
underpin creative industries (as with SirJoshua Reynolds' goals in the founding
documents of the Royal Academy of Art in London in 1768).61 They would be the
breeding ground for new kinds of educators who could help to reshape Chinese society.
It is important to understand this facet of the academies' genesis, as it distinguishes
their motivation from other art education environments. Rather than merely producing
specialized art and culture workers who would populate the elite realm of aesthetic
discourse, the academies were designed to produce competent educators at the
elementary and secondary school level. This fundamental orientation towards
generalized aesthetic education as a path to Republican citizenship was in opposition to
the prevailing Modernist conception of the artist as avant-garde, anti-academic, or
outside of society that had been encountered by Lin Fengmian, Xu Beihong, and Liu
Haisu in Europe. It was also oppositional to the traditional view of the Chinese artist as a
scholar-amateur who cultivated his painting, calligraphy, and poetry in a disinterested
and certainly non-professional way over a lifetime.
For the purposes of this dissertation, it is crucial to understand the ambitious
scope of Cai's program, and the democratizing effect he hoped it would have on
Republican Chinese society. Criticism of the generally degraded state of the arts in
China at the dawn of the Republic and before the implementation of Cai's program was
heard from many corners, including the poet Xu Zhimo in 1922:
6
1Joshua Reynolds and Robert R. Wark, "Discourse I," and "Discourse II," in Discourseson Art (New
Haven: Published for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art (London) Ltd. by Yale University
Press, 1997), 13-21 & 25-37.
49
Painting is another sad story. A dim memory of the fact that we once have seen
the vast generous sweeps of Wu Daozi, and the large and subtle compositions of
Wang Wei, or, to name a more recent instance, the calm and sure vision ofJin
Dongxin, revolts us to think that for many a day, we have seen but at best skillful
technicians, sham imitators, and frank humbugs, totally devoid of originality and
creative force. And then there are those ninth-rate followers of European
methods, who are as puerile in technique as they are void in imagination, worse
than the tame practitioners of traditional type in the sense that the latter generally
puts you into humor and makes you smile, whereas the former frequently puts
you out of humor and excites your sadist complex to distinction [sic].62
Cai's design of the nation's art education system to impact a wider audience meant that
the academy's students received a skills-based art teacher's education in addition to
elements of a liberal arts education. This did not necessarily place the traditional Chinese
artist's role as a true master, the kind mourned by Xu Zhimo, or an elite cultural, political
and societal critic out of reach of the academy students. It did mean that to become this
type of artist would require individual initiative, extra-curricular exploration, and
exceptional talent. As the following section will explore, Cai Yuanpei was committed to
encouraging plurality, tolerance, and experimental exploration in China's art academies
and universities, thus creating the conditions for an elite subset of the academic
population to re-engage with the traditional role of the Chinese scholar-artist.
The Education Sector, Scholar-Artists and the State: Prolegomena to a SemiAutonomous Intellectual Sphere in Reform Era China
Art education in the Reform Era (1978-present) reflects rebuilding and recovering
from the institutional instability resulting from disruptions in education and the society as
a whole during the twentieth century, most notably during the late 1950s, 1960s, and
62
Xu Zhimo, "Art and Life," originally written in English and published in Creativity Quartery (Chuangzao
Jikan)2, no. 1 (1922), anthologized and edited for stylistic change from the original English text in Modern
Chinese Literay Thought: Writings on Literature,1893-1945, ed. Kirk A. Denton (Stanford, Calif: Stanford
University Press, 1996), 170.
50
early 1970s when schools were closed or under-enrolled during the Great Leap Forward
(1957-1961) and the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976). These disruptions corresponded
to formative years for the artists of the '85 Art New Wave, most of whom were born in
the early 1960s. Discontinuities in the availability of education fundamentally skewed the
population attending post-secondary education geographically toward the coastal and
northeastern provinces and demographically toward the children of families that had
been targeted as bourgeois during the Cultural Revolution. 63
The reinvigoration of China's education sector and individual intellectuals is an
important backdrop for the re-opening of the nation's art academies. Legislation
mandating nine years of compulsory free schooling was enacted in 1986, and the
percentage of the overall national budget allotted to education almost tripled from 6 .8 %
in 1978 to 18.8% in 1998.64 This time period covers the schooling of the artists of the '85
Art New Wave including Zhang Peili (Zhejiang Academy of Fine Art class of 1984) and
Wu Shanzhuan (Zhejiang Academy of Fine Art class of 1986), and their slightly junior
contemporary Zhang Huan (Central Academy of Fine Art class of 1993). For the
purposes of this study, this puts China's elite art fine art academies in the context of a
domestic economy that was developing rapidly. Not only was education becoming a
more robust portion of the national budget, institutions of higher education became the
natural home for rehabilitated so-called "rightists" who had been persecuted during the
Cultural Revolution or the Anti-Rightist Campaign of 1957. At the Central Academy of
Fine Arts, the regrouped faculty formed in 1977 included forty-four rightists purged in
1957 and a hundred and twenty-six faculty that had been removed and persecuted during
63
64
Guang Hua Wan, Inequalip and Growth in Modern China (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 165.
Ibid,166
.51
the Cultural Revolution. 65 These rightists re-introduced elements of liberalism,
individualism, and competition that had been purged from artistic production and
education during the 1960s and early 1970s. The academies' initial classes upon reopening in the late 1970s after the Cultural Revolution had been composed primarily of
artists born in the 1950s who had worked as propaganda artists during the Cultural
Revolution and thus already had a solid technical foundation in Socialist Realism and
real life experience. These students received a fairly hands-off education at the
academies, which provided studio space and access to a group of peers rather than a
formal curriculum for the first few years that it re-opened. 66 Shui Tianzhong (b. 1935), an
influential art historian and art magazine editor, described the faculty in these very early
years of the Reform Era as open-minded, welcoming of foreign influences, and
sympathetic to their students' curiosity and new ideas. However, they were still
traumatized by their recent experiences and unable to share much of their artistic or
personal experiences. 67
The subsequent generation of students at the academies in the 1980s had been
born during the 1960s, and the educational disruptions of the Cultural Revolution had
delayed their education. They also came to the academy slightly later in life than other
generations of students, although without the professional background of the socialist
realist art workers who had populated the art academies in the late 1970s. Still, they were
eager and willing to conform to the curricular and non-curricular leadership of their
professors who were more prepared to teach once the academies had reconstituted their
program a few years into the Reform Era, after the original classes had completed their
65
Martina Kappel-Yang, Semiotic Warfare (Hong Kong: Timezone 8, 2003), 43.
66 Ibid
6? Ibid,
42.
52
studies. The 1980s students' generational return to formal schooling came at an
interesting time characterized by substantial curricular experimentation and innovation
within the traditional university system. 68 This might have been a factor in the
widespread interest in extra-curricular "seminars and discussions" mentioned by Xu Bing
in the epigraph to this chapter. This type of informal intellectual gathering was certainly
part of the overwhelming vitality of the education sector in the Reform Era; it is also a
discrete cultural phenomenon in its own right, integral to the development of nonofficial
intellectual and artistic spheres.
The evolution of this quasi-autonomous space was one of the most important
factors creating the conditions for artistic experimentation in new media. The merging of
official and non-official academic environments in the 1980s through the creation of
organizations like the Culture Academy in Beijing, founded in 1984, is part of the
contemporary Chinese rediscovery of the tradition of local or private academies (sixue).
This was an important step away from state-led social and educational organizations that
had dominated the public landscape for the majority of the People's Republic Era, where
even "popular" (minjian, & fil) groups that met outside of formal academic institutions
were conduits for state organs to disseminate their policies and principles. 69 NeoConfucian learning and preparation for the civil service examinations in the Qing
dynasty had fallen into the categories of sixue (fr),
private or local academies funded by
the students' families and communities, and guanxue ('!*), the official academies.
6
1
Ruth Hayhoe, China's Universities, 1895-1995: A Century of Cultural Conflict (New York: Garland, 1996), 119.
69Gordon White, Riding the Tiger: The Politics of Economic Reform in Post-Mao China (Stanford, Calif: Stanford
University Press, 1993), 79.
5.3
Guanxue institutions were the original elite schools that cultivated scholar-officials. 7 0 Sixue
were also the domain of the elite scholar-gentry, and tended to gain status during periods
when dissenting scholars took issue with the methods of the guanxue. Very early twentieth
century private institutions like Nanyang, Fudan, and China Colleges, all in Shanghai,
were self-consciously branded as modem gongxue (public schools) to avoid association with
the elite guanxue and sixue of the past 7' By the 1980s, however, non-governmental
schooling filled a gap that the official government academies could not due to the strict
party regulations on education.
The intersection of the intellectual public sphere and the art academy is an
important one since student life at these institutions in the 1980s resonated with both the
technical and practical education prescribed by educational leaders like Cai Yuanpei in
the early days of the Republican Era. A renewed interest in informal study was
reminiscent of the study societies (xuehui, J-M ) of the1920s and 1930s. 72 Both of these
episodes in modem Chinese art and aesthetic history and must be considered foundations
for the new media explorations by young art academy graduates in the 1980s.
70 Xiaoping Cong, Teachers' Schools and the Making of the Modern Chinese Nation-State, 1897-1937 (Vancouver:
University of British Columbia Press, 2007), 19-20.
71 Wen-Hsin Yeh, The AlienatedAcademy: Cultureand Politicsin Republican China, 1919-1937 (Cambridge, Mass:
Published by Council on East Asian Studies, Harvard University and distributed by Harvard University
Press, 1990), 92.
72Xuehui originated in the late nineteenth century to organize and educate elite Chinese social and
intellectual elites to the cause of reform and modernization. These societies, sometimes topical but often
general and based on locality, grew and expanded after the founding of the Republic and then increased
even more in the 1920s after the initiation of the May Fourth (New Culture) Movement. These
associations, many of which began publishing associated journals, were crucial in the development of a nongovernmental public sphere and in the expansion of China's publishing industry. (Wang Ke-wen, "Study
Societies (Xuehui)" in Modern China An Encclopedia ofHistoy, Culture andNationalism, Wang Ke-wen, ed. (New
York: Garland, 1998), 335-336.)
54
New Culture Movement Policies and Prescriptions
1910s and 1920s Republican Era education was constructed around a notion of
modernization based on logic, science, and a belief in the fundamental good and moral
nature of mankind. During this period of early nationhood, Republican administrators
wanted to break ties with Imperial era Confucian education, and thus emphasized
mathematics and technical artistic skills. 73 All educational institutions were brought
under the supervision of the Ministry of Education, and all curricula were reoriented to
emphasize the morality, patriotism, and technical competence. Cai Yuanpei, as the
Republic's first Minster of Education, applied Western theories to his vision of modem
China by emphasizing the humanistic values drawn from the work of Charles Darwin
and Peter Kropotkin.74 As a result, beginning in 1912, Cai forbade education in
Confucian classics at the elementary school level, considering them retrograde and
unscientific, and replaced them with practical instruction in drawing and crafts.75 This
dramatic shift was also linked to his interpretation of aesthetics and beauty in the works of
Kant and Schiller, eloquently synthesized in his 1917 address to the Shenzhou Scholarly
Society, "Replacing Religion with Aesthetic Education," as discussed above.76 Cai
understood the cultivation of aesthetic understanding and sensitivity to stimulate a widereaching, morally upright worldview:
73 Cyrus Henderson Peake, Nationalism and Education in Modern China (New York: H. Fertig, 1970), 75.
74
Interpretations of Darwin's theory of evolution were prominent and ubiquitous in Republican Era
educational systems. Cai Yuanpei's prediliction for the theory of evolution was both because of its
usefulness in scientific research and the radical social impact that the theory had around the world,
providing a new scientific basis for a modem view of all biological and social phenomena. Cai was similarly
drawn to the Russian anarchist Kropotkin's late nineteenth century work Mutual ild A Factor ofEvolution as
an optimistic corollary to Darwin's theories. Mutual Aid used scientific research on Siberian ecosystems to
proclaim that despite competition and struggle for limited resources, organismic cooperation is the real key
to species thriving and surviving. This theory became one of the keystones of Cai's educational policy
throughout the 1910s and 1920s that emphasized national unity above all.
75 WilliamJ. Duiker, Ts'ai ran-P'e, Educator ofModern China (University Park, Penn: Pennsylvania State
University Press, 1977), 47.
76 Cai Yuanpei, "Replacing Religion," 182-189.
5.5
What cultivates our emotions in pure aesthetic education is that it produced pure and
lofty habits and gradually eliminates selfishness and the concept of benefiting ourselves
through harming others.... If beauty is universal, there cannot exist within it the
77
consciousness of ourselves as differentiated from other people.
He concretized this belief with the implementation of universal art education, taken to
mean practical hands-on skills-building. For the purposes of this dissertation, it is
important to understand this early twentieth century educational policy as it affected the
college students of the 1930s, who would go on to hold senior administrative positions in
the educational institutions of the early Reform Era. Cai and other educational reformers
of the New Culture Movement were born in the late nineteenth century and represented
the last generation of Confucian-educated scholars and the first generation to study
Western theories abroad. To them, China's future as a modern nation could be
engineered only by the implementation of educational policies that would teach students
to value democracy and science. Their utopian hopes for sweeping change were firmly
imprinted upon the next generation who were well versed in Darwinian theories and
aesthetic principles, but the students themselves did not mirror the optimism of the New
Culture Movement. Instead, they were characterized by a generational malaise and
sense of alienation. Brought on by the political machinations of competing factions
within the Republican government that sought to manipulate student political groups as
well as the isolation that urban college students felt from their families and hometowns,
the dissatisfaction felt by the generation that came of age during the Guomindang's
Nanjing Decade (1927-1937) let to a powerful re-consideration of the trope of the hermitscholar.
77
Ibid., 186.
56
College Students of the Nanjing Decade and their imprint on the 1980s
There are important resonances between the '85 Art New Wave and the student
movements during the early twentieth century since many of the senior scholars and
administrators in China in the 1980s were themselves college students during the late
1920s and 1930s. Key figures include: the linguist Wang Li who taught at Beijing
University until his death in 1986;Jiang Nanxiang, Minister of Education from 1979 to
1982 (who remained an active member of the Communist Party's Central Committee
throughout the 1980s); and Hu Sheng, the party historian and theoretician who served as
the president of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences from 1985 to 1998. The missing
generation of professors in their 40s that would have been educated during the Cultural
Revolution meant that the faculty profile at many universities skewed older than the
traditional age distribution.78 In addition to this imbalance, many promising young
faculty who graduated with advanced degrees immediately after the Cultural Revoluation
were attracted to non-academic careers with new private companies (either Chinese or
joint ventures with foreign investors) or left China for careers abroad. 79
The creation and oversight of many journals and study societies in the Reform
Era can thus be better understood with respect to the generation that came of age during
the Nanjing Decade. As historian Wen-Hsin Yeh has explored in her work The Alienated
Academy: Culture and Politics in Republican China, 1919-1937, the Nanjing Decade was a
crucial time in the development of modern institutions of higher learning in China, when
despite the academic orientation toward modernization and scientific progress, many
students at this time experienced a sense of alienation, a socio-cultural phenomenon that
78 Michael Agelasto and Bob Adamson, HgherEducation in Post-Mao China(Hong Kong: Hong Kong
University Press, 1998), 178.
79
Ibid., 49-50.
57
will be discussed further. This was the historic moment when colleges and universities
truly distanced themselves from Confucian guanxue academies and implemented modern
courses of study in science and engineering. Several colleges also began to conduct some
of these classes in English, and intense intellectual debates regarding Chinese culture and
artistic lineage were intertwined with discussions of philology and phonology. 80
The location of these issues of national cultural identity in the realm of linguistics
is part of the overall collapsing of humanities, social sciences, and the arts into one
complex conversation on the overall state of academics in China as a calculus of
traditional, modern, and Western influences. These conversations mingled the prevailing
interest in promoting empirical methods of Western science in all disciplines, with the
examination of Qing and Ming philologists for their rigorous and methodical analysis of
classical texts. Scholars thus engaged the language of modernity as a means for
reinserting otherwise out-of-favor Confucian texts like the Shuijing (Classic of the
Waterways) into the college curriculum. 8 1 It is unsurprising, then that the college students
at this time, guided by the heavily literary faculty of China's universities became
comfortable with the hybridization of traditional Chinese philosophy and Western social
science. It is also unsurprising that the students of the 1930s, separated from their
traditional social support networks by the modern urban education system that the New
Culture Movement had put in place, were drawn to themes of alienation and isolation as
found in both traditional Chinese texts and modern Western theories. For example Zhu
Guangqian (1897-1986), a professor of philosophy at Beijing University and the
acknowledged founder of the study of aesthetics in China, observed his students in the
80
Yeh, TheAlienatedAcadeny, 32.
81 Ibid, 35.
.58
1930s as moral and noble-minded, but also easily swayed and lacking a sense of
confidence about their own futures as well as the future of the Republic. According to
Zhu, the Nanjing Decade generation was philosophically unmoored and easily changed,
"as if infected with an emotional malaria."8 2
While it is unreasonable to assert that the Nanjing Decade generation was
uniformly and consistently disillusioned, it is important to note that they generally felt an
obligation to be dissatisfied and unhappy and were quite influenced by faculty who
highlighted the malaise of scholars throughout Chinese history. As college students in a
time of political upheaval, they felt a certain moral imperative to adopt the melancholy
stance of literati figures.
One often-cited precedent for the behavior that Yeh describes
as, "...a moral imperative to feel despondent when times were bad,"83 was the endowed
charitable estate of the Fan clan, established by the Confucian philanthropist and Song
scholar-statesman Fan Zhongyan (989-1052).81 Fan Zhongyan was quite often referenced
during the Nanjing Decade for his insistence on the duties of the literati class to practice
self-denial and dedicate themselves to the problems of society at large. As quoted by Liu
Yizheng (1880-1956), a history professor at Dongnan University in Nanjing and editor of
the influential journal Xueheng (CriticalReview,
.f-r),
in his 1922 article "On the
Responsibility of University Students", Fan asserts that the educated class should be, "the
first to worry about the troubles of the world, but the last to enjoy its pleasures." 8 5 This
appeal to students to rediscover the Confucian scholars' duties to "the world" was both a
82 Ibid.,
246.
83 Ibid.
84
Denis Twitchett, "The Fan Clan's Charitable Estate: 1050-1760," in Confucianism in Action, eds. David S.
Nivison and Arthur F. Wright (Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press, 1959), 97-133.
85
Michel Hockx and Kirk A. Denton, Litera Societies ofRepublican China (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books,
2008), 161.
59
call to action and an affirmation that a scholar's professed dissatisfaction with the state of
the world was itself an important intellectual contribution.
The journal Xueheng was organized by scholars opposed to the reformist Doubting
Antiquity School (D.A.S.) of Hu Shi (1891-1962) and GuJiegang (1893-1980) associated
with the New Culture Movement. Xueheng's editorial staff included the aforementioned
Liu Yizheng, a classically trained Confucian scholar who came of age at the end of the
Qing dynasty, and
a group of Harvard-educated scholars affiliated with the humanist
Irving Babbitt.85 It is critical to understand that the Confucianism revived by the Xueheng
group was not conservative or reactionary, but rather an alternative modernist challenge
to the generically reform-minded D.A.S. Xueheng published articles on classical Chinese,
classical Western, and comparative historical and literary topics from 1922-1933, and in
so doing provided a picture of Confucian China as a site of early cosmopolitanism and an
admirable source of a particularly Chinese modernity. This was an important periodical
in that it countered the dominant narrative proposed by Chen Duxiu (1879-1942) and the
editors of Xin
Qingnian (New Touth or Lajeunesse, -f*-t-)
that insisted upon the active
refusal of Confucian scholarship in favor of vernacularization on the one hand, and the
introduction of Western theories of science and democracy on the other.
Another Confucian figure that received attention from college students in the
1930s was Qu Yuan (329 BCE - 299 BCE), an exiled poet and scholar of the Warring
States Period who committed suicide to protest his kingdom's corruption. It is by no
means unusual that Qu Yuan should receive attention during the confused Nanjing
Decade, as he was a perennial symbol of unwavering morality among Chinese scholars
86
Tze-Ki Hon, "Cultural Identity and Local Self-Government: A Study of Liu Yizheng's History of
Chinese Culture,"Modern China. 30, no. 4 (2004): 513; Shuang Shen, CosmopolitanPublics: Anglophone Print
Culture in Semi-ColonialShanghai (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2009), 49.
60
throughout the Imperial period and was brought forward seamlessly into the twentieth
century. 87 What is interesting to note are the subsequent, near-simultaneous, readings of
Qu's martyrdom as a clarion call for the New Culture Movement's energetic iconoclasm
and the disenchanted melancholy of the students of the Nanjing Decade who had grown
up in the Republic of China. The chaos of constant political turmoil and competing
notions of modernization and reform had devolved into partisan rivalry and left the
nation ill-equipped to deal with a growing military threat fromJapan.
Other figures from dynastic China that received attention from students during
the Nanjing Decade were the Tang poet Li Bai (705-762), whose poems often featured an
eremitic traveler passing through the universe unmoored; the philosopher and literary
figure Zhuangzi (369 BCE - 286 BCE), who dreamt he was a butterfly only to awake and
realize he himself might be the subject of a butterfly's dream; and the Three Kingdoms
Period warlord-poet Cao Cao (155-220), who wrote often about the brevity of life and the
ephemeral nature of beauty.88 The 1930s was thus a time of philosophical reinvention
and literary revisitation, not of Confucian morals per se but of the possible application of
Confucian moralism to the problems of a modern society.
Similarly, the prevalence of Darwinian theories of evolution in students' primary,
secondary, and post-secondary education and the increasing presence of social
Darwinism in intellectual debates of the time gave rise to yet another interpretation of Qu
Yuan. Students interpolated Qu Yuan's suicide as evidence that morality and heroism
made one ill-equipped to survive in a fundamentally corrupt human society. As asserted
87
Ralph C. Croizier, "Qu Yuan and the Artists: Ancient Symbols and Modem Politics in the Post- Mao
Era," The AustralianJournal of ChineseAffairs no. 24 (1990): 25-50, reprinted in Using the Past to Serve the Present:
Historiography
and Politics in Contemporary China, ed. Jonathan Unger, (Armonk, N.Y.: M.E. Sharpe, 1993).
88
Yeh, The AlienatedA caderny 249.
61
by Wen-Hsin Yeh, a historian of early twentieth century China, the student generation of
the 1930s had:
... through a combination of philosophical melancholy, political disillusionment, cultural
iconoclasm, and scientistic materialism... arrived at a profound weariness with nearly all
sociopolitical formulations that involved power and authority, accompanied by a general
skepticism towards a wide range of human endeavor. 89
The generational weariness that Yeh describes might be better understood with respect to
the legacy of student political activism in 1920s China. Originally spontaneous and
genuine in the years following the 1919 May Fourth Movement, it had become much less
authentic by the 1930s. 90 By this time, the Nationalist government was firmly in power
and had both introduced mandatory political training and inserted non-student political
leaders in the universities' student clubs. 91 The elite college students of the 1930s met this
canned political consciousness with skepticism and ennui, opting out of public political life
altogether and instead retreating in the manner of their eremitic dynastic counterparts.
As conveyed in the trope of the impoverished hermit scholar fisherman depicted by Wu
Zhen, the retreat from contemporary political activism was a form of moral admonition
by abstaining from the corrupt world of politics. In the 1930s, however, the retreat was
not into a natural setting, but into the university.
The legacy of these attitudes of the students of the Nanjing Decade is not
perpetual cynicism, however. Rather than collapsing altogether, prior grassroots activity
89Ibid 253.
90 The terms May Fourth Movement and New Culture Movement are often used interchangeably to refer
to the period of cultural reform in the 191 Os and 1920s oriented towards redefining and modernizing
Chinese culture by applying scientific and democratic principles. It is important, however, to distinguish
the elite cultural and intellectual overtones of the general New Culture Movement, and the political
character of the May Fourth Movement. The latter movement was initiated on May Fourth, 1919, to
protest the weak Nationalist government and its inadequate response to China's embarrassing treatment in
the Treaty of Versailles whereby German colonial possessions in Shandong province were transferred to
Japan rather than returned to China. Where the New Culture Movement had its roots in late nineteenth
century Qing reform movements initiated by the intellegentsia, the May Fourth Movement was initiated by
university students and aimed to recruit a broad, populist base to the cause.
91 Yeh, The Alienated Academy, 230.
62
encouraged openness to a multiplicity of modem worldviews. These included Confucian
and other traditional Chinese academic sources that had been largely discounted by the
dominant New Culture Movement. By the 1970s and 1980s, many of these Nanjing
Decade students were senior officials who had been biding their time until Deng-era
academic policy, when they were able to reshape of the post-secondary education system
in the wake of the Cultural Revolution. Hu Sheng (1918-2000), a student of Zhu
Guangqian at Beijing University in the 1930s, was one such figure whose connection to
the Nanjing Decade later became salient As a senior undergraduate student in 1937, Hu
had undertaken a catalog of his fellow students' prevailing outlooks and came up with
four main categories: nihilism, hedonism, fatalism, and pessimism. 92 It is hardly
surprising that a scholar who came of age while analyzing the ambiguous social and
academic tendencies of his classmates became an administrator known for his
inconsistency toward hot-button issues like "bourgeois liberalization". In his own
research, Hu focused on modern Chinese history, specifically that of the Chinese
Communist Party, a history he witnessed firsthand beginning in 1949 when he worked for
the party's theoretical research and publicity departments. By 1975, at tail end of the
Cultural Revolution, Deng Xiaoping brought Hu into the Political Study Office, an
influential think tank that aimed to undercut the influence of the Gang of Four. 93 Hu's
presence in the upper administration of the Party was tied to Deng's return from being
purged. As Deng rose to power, Hu became an editor of thejournal Red Flag (Hongqi, kr.
4), an academic publication of the Central
Committee of the CPC, and a senior
member and eventually president of the Reform Era institution the Chinese Academy of
92
Ibid, 243.
93
David Michael Finkelstein and Maryanne Kivlehan, China'sLeadership in the 21st Centuy: The Rise ofthe
Fourth Generation (Armonk, N.Y.: M.E. Sharpe, 2003), 153.
63
Social Sciences (CASS) from 1985-1998. Hu's leadership at CASS took a variety of
theoretical positions, linked to the shifting political leanings of the times. In 1986 he
upheld the trend toward reformist liberalization, and argued for freedom in all realms of
academic research. 94 He published these thoughts in Red Flag declaring that there were
no forbidden areas of research in the social sciences, and that the Party should not take
official stances on areas of academic controversy. Most notably, he called for the Party to
allow research in areas that did not directly involve the conscious application of Marxism
and to encourage the study of history for history's sake without direct correspondence to
contemporary political affairs. 95 He also went so far as to encourage openness to
"bourgeois" research, posing the question, "Can we not also learn something from the
harmonious movements in certain fields of the capitalist society?"96
Hu's position at CASS allowed him to set the tone for much academic research
and publication in general, including artistic production in the academies throughout the
1980s. But Hu's reform-minded proclamations, given in 1986 on the occasion of the
thirtieth anniversary of the Hundred Flowers Movement at the Sixth Party Plenum, were
leveraged at the same meeting, where an official CPC proclamation announced a shift
back towards a commitment to purer Marxism. 97 Following this plenum, Hu proclaimed
that Marxism should, in fact, be the guiding principle in academic research, and that
equal value could not be assigned to competing schools of thought. He did, however,
94
Margaret Sleeboom-Faulkner, The ChineseAcadeny of Social Sciences (CASS): Shaping the Reforms, Academia and
China (1977-2003) (Leiden: Brill, 2007), 79.
95 Clifford Edmunds, "The Politics of Historiography:Jian Bozan's Historicism," in China's Intellectuals and
the State: In Search of aNew Relationship, eds. Merle Goldman, Timothy Cheek, and Carol Lee Hamrin
(Cambridge, Mass: Council on East Asian Studies, Harvard University, 1987), 99.
96
Sleeboom-Faulkner, The ChineseAcademy of Social Sciences, 79.
97 Held in September 1986, the Sixth Plenum of the 12th Party Congress resolved against "bourgeois
liberalization" and "spiritual pollution," signaling a gradual end to the liberal atmosphere of the Beijing
Spring of 1984-1985.
64
maintain his position that the nation required robust research in the social sciences in
order to combat "spiritual pollution," and encouraged scholars to "change the selfseclusion of research work in the past, and to boldly import academic ideas from all
countries in the world" while still maintaining the party line that Marxism needed to be
employed in all intellectual inquiry. 98 This somewhat contradictory position can be read
with respect to the coded language in which many of the intellectual discussions of his
youth were conducted whereby Chinese philology and phonology were discussed in place
of more overtly political topics. While publicly aligning himself with Party directives, Hu
had long ago witnessed the flexibility necessary for an academic to survive in the tenuous
political environments of twentieth century China. Furthermore, if we are to believe that
he himself absorbed some of his generation's disillusionment, it can be assumed that he
also maintained a healthy skepticism of party reforms and that he saw his administrative
role as that of an interlocutor between bureaucrat and intellectual - satisfying and
educating the former while encouraging or cautioning the latter.
It is my contention that the fluidity of Hu's politically tinged academic policies
throughout the 1980s is linked to the social and intellectual environments of his college
days in the 1930s. Many scholars who came of age during the Nanjing Decade, like Hu,
were profoundly affected by the political turmoil of their youth and remained open to
foreign theories and Confucian sources that were held in suspicion by the Party's Central
Committee. In particular, Hu's own scholarship had revealed both the appropriation of
traditional Confucian intellectual exploration and the artistic themes of melancholy and
alienation - key elements in the intellectual formation of the Nanjing Decade generation.
The continuing influence of this generation is thus important to our understanding of
98
Sleeboom-Faulkner, The ChineseA cademy of Social Sciences, 94, note 61.
65
intellectual and artistic freedom and experimentation in the Reform Era, for several
reasons. First, the preservation and resurrection of Confucian and traditional Chinese
learning was limited to the universities and academies of the Reform Era. These
institutions thus served as environments where the Party's policies and directives were
muted by the goals of "research," as had been the rule with college campuses in the 1930s
- the site of individuals' personal exploration rather than political engagement. Second,
this public declaration of the importance of learning from bourgeois Western and
traditional Chinese sources even after the retreat in 1986 implied an apolitical approach
to academic study, similar to the dominance of the scientific method in 1930s intellectual
discourse.
Artistic and Intellectual Autonomy in the Semi/Public Sphere of the 1980s
The "Beijing Spring," as China's early Reform Era is known, particularly the
years 1978-1979, has been described as a thawing, awakening, and emerging from
hibernation. Extending the seasonal metaphor, the 1980s have been described as a time
of intellectual flowering. These terms have been applied largely to the nation's economy
and political relationships with the outside world, but neither opening would have been
possible without the simultaneous reinvigoration of China's domestic cultural realm. It is
in this realm that the artists at the heart of our investigation must be situated. Although
scholars' discussions of China's intellectuals of this era have largely focused on writers and
to a lesser extent scientists, this dissertation argues that artists were primary agents in the
reworking of culture at this time. I thus include artists in the group branded "cultural
intellectuals" by the political scientist Edward X. Gu, who by this term refers to thinkers
who concerned themselves with large questions pertaining to humanity writ large
66
regardless of disciplinary boundaries.99 These intellectuals found themselves in uncertain
territory as they sprung free of the planned economic system that had formerly given
them an official work-unit assignation. Where this development would lead, however,
was completely unclear, and the first efforts to carve out new autonomous intellectual and
economic realms were tentative and nonlinear.
The general liberalization and reform in the academic and cultural arenas
encouraged by Hu Sheng and CASS in the mid-1980s has been well documented as the
phenomenon of "Culture Fever," (wenhua re,
f).100 This loosely defined and
pervasive cultural development was nonofficial and private in the tradition of sixue. This
phenomenon was initiated by the scholars themselves, yet initially it had the tacit
approval of the Party's administrators. The main theme of intellectual exploration
fostered a re-examination of Chinese traditional culture and non-Marxist Western
theories as a means to create an alternative set of ideologies with which to leverage the
official Party line: orthodox Marxist-Leninist and Mao Zedong Thought. The new ideas
resonated with the Party's experimental economic reforms, and as such did not constitute
an oppositional movement despite their nonofficial nature. Newly formed organizations
and institutions usually maintained an affiliation with official and mainstream institutions
due to the lack of non-official funding and the reliance upon official infrastructures. 10 1
Nevertheless, Culture Fever in China was a rich and productive period, and a
proliferation of magazines, book series, and other intellectual publications emerged in the
99
Edward X. Gu, "Cultural Intellectuals and the Politics of the Cultural Public Space in Communist China
(1979-1989)," The JournalofAsian &udies, Vol. 58, No. 2 (May 1999): 390.
S00 SeeJing Wang, High CultureFever: Politics,Aesthetics, andIdeology in Deng's China, (Berkeley, Calif: University
of California Press, 1996); and Xudong Zhang, ChineseModernism in the Era ofReforms: CulturalFever,AvantGardeFiction, and the New Chinese Cinema (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997).
101Gu, "Cultural Intellectuals," 390.
67
early- to mid-1980s. Non-governmental educational organizations and think tanks as
well as private academies began to crop up in the academic realm. The founding of these
institutions was linked to the overall interest in rediscovering and rehabilitating a Chinese
academic lineage. Specifically, the tradition of stxue, as it had been developed during the
Tang and Song dynasties, was actively revived as a traditional institutional model. Thus,
new 1980s institutions like the Culture Academy, an adult education institution founded
by philosophy professors from Beijing University, were created with the Tang and Song
models in mind: institutions that were pluralistic compared to the official guanxue
academies that followed prescribed orthodoxy. 0 2 The founders of the Culture Academy
also looked to dynastic models in order to secure funding and support for their nascent
institution by employing the practice of shangshu (-ti) - submitting written requests to
high officials for patronage. 0 3 This reveals both historical sensitivity and political savvy
on the part of the professors, as Deng Xiaoping and Party Chairman Hu Yaobang had
spoken extensively in the early Reform Era about the need for the nation's intellectuals to
provide leadership in implementing the Four Modernizations: agriculture, industry,
defense, and science and technology. These areas of modernization had been promoted
since the 1960s as the means by which China could become economically self-reliant and
globally significant. While the Culture Academy did not pretend to fulfill the specific
areas identified in the four modernizations, the professors knew that their status as
intellectuals, many of them senior authorities in their fields, was a valuable affiliation for
the Party. The Culture Academy group thus applied the technique of shangshu by writing
directly to Hu Yaobang, with immediate results in the form of funding and endorsement
02
103
Ibid, 409.
Ibid.
68
despite their continuing nonofficial status. 10 4 The Party of the Reform Era was thus
implicated in the support of humanities and social sciences (essentially "superstructure"
with respect to strict Marxist doctrine) in addition to economic and social development.
For the purposes of this dissertation, it is imperative to understand that the general
development of independent academies and publications in the intellectual realm was
equally present in the art world. Artists were among the cultural intellectuals that
participated in Culture Fever. Artists associated with the '85 New Art Wave were prolific
in the realm of self-publishing, but were equally invested in the re-invigoration of China's
official print media channels. This negotiation of various kinds of cultural public space is
consistent with the efforts from many different intellectual sectors that were by necessity
reliant upon official publications because of the state funding that made these periodicals
viable.
The revolutionary nature of these quasi-official and nonofficial publications
should be considered with respect to the history of publishing in modem China. Shortly
after the establishment of the People's Republic, all publications came under the
supervision of the centralized State Publication Bureau in Beijing.10 5 While the semiofficial and nonofficial publications initiated by cultural intellectuals in the 1980s were
indulged, it should be noted that it was technically illegal to purchase or own
photoduplication technology, short or long-wave radio equipment, or other means of
producing and distributing print or broadcast media. Some private publishing initiatives
were the subject of harassment by officials, and in some cases, these publishing houses
104 Ibid
105 Zhengyuan Fu, Autocratic Tradition and Chinese Politics (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press,
1993), 229.
69
were shut down, often on the grounds that they were distributing pornography.1 06 The
freedom to publish or distribute works was thus highly constrained, despite the general
trends of reform and liberalization that allowed for the blossoming of a print media
culture that accompanied the Beijing Spring.
Members of the New Wave contributed to official publications like the Chinese
Artists' Association's magazine Fine Arts (Meishu) as well, which reflected an editorial
reorganization that embraced the avant-garde.1 07 One exception to the rule that stable
and professional periodicals were state-funded was the weekly publication Fine Arts in
China (Zhongguo Meishu Bao, t PQ 4.A), published from 1985 to 1989. This was a
privately financed publication that was given official endorsement, perhaps the most
important forum for communication among artists groups and societies from around the
country. Published out of the China Arts Research Academy, FineArts in China aimed to
present a "scientific" and balanced report of the "conflicts and controversies of the art
world."1 08 In so doing, it acted as a chronicle of the weekly events taking place across the
country, as well as a forum for exploring sensitive or controversial media or subject
matter in the spirit of disinterested reporting.
The presence of provocative editorial content in official publications like Art and
FineArts in China was possible in the mid- to late-1980s while China's intellectual
establishment underwent a process of re-institutionalization. That is, the intellectual
public sphere was self-consciously re-creating itself after almost complete destruction.
Individuals who had been publicly criticized and in some cases exiled during the Cultural
106
Ibid
107 Martina Kappel-Yang, "Appendix: A Nationwide Forum and Model: Art Magazines and Symposia," in
Contemporary Chinese Art: PrimaryDocuments, Wu Hung and Peggy Wang, eds., (New York: Museum of
Modem Art, 2010), 47.
108 Ibid., 50, note 21.
70
Revolution found themselves rehabilitated and placed in positions of authority in the
reconfigured university structure, while young scholars found themselves given the
opportunity to take on leadership roles in official organizations. The intellectuals in such
an environment were understandably cautious - they took only tentative steps to define
this new institutionalism in a manner that would give voice to a wide range of
intellectuals, including those who operated outside of the official circuits. One such
unofficial group was he Pond Society, an organization of young graduates in the shadow
of the Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts founded in Hangzhou in 1985. Before examining
them, it is necessary to understand the role of the Chinese Artists' Association and other
official organs of the Chinese art world at this time.
The Chinese Artists' Association and Art in the Official Sphere
The Chinese Artists' Association (Zhongguo Meiskujia Xiehui, t PQ J44
#14),like
other voluntary but exclusive professional associations in the arts as well as the world of
academia, is a party-state-affiliated organization that falls under the Department of
Propaganda and is funded by the Ministry of Culture. The corresponding departments of
the provincial party committees supervise provincial branches of this organization.109
Interestingly, the large-scale reforms initiated by Deng Xiaoping in 1978 stressed
professionalism over ideology, so the status of artists and academics was significantly
raised, and the role of the Chinese Artists' Association became one of facilitation more
than supervision. This allowed for the conditions that permitted avant-garde
experimentation within official channels of education, exhibition, and publication."10
109 Fu, Autocratic Tradition, 228.
I"OK6ppel-Yang, Semiotic Warfare, 41.
71
Correspondingly, modern and contemporary art could enter official communications,
coming within reach of the general urban, educated population rather than only a few
initiated participants in an underground movement. As with the Fine Arts Academies
themselves, the Chinese Artists' Association had been suspended during the Cultural
Revolution, and was not reinstated until after 1978. The Artists' Association maintained
its status as the primary national organization for official professional artists, and it
retained control over the National Gallery of Art, but its regional branches began to take
on a new significance during the 1980s. Thus, even with this ostensibly national group,
the art scene in China became a series of regional niches, overseen by provincial-level
administrators.m The 1978 statutes of the Artists' Association reveal the generalized
liberalism of the time that left much to be interpreted at the provincial and local levels:
We organize for the members to carry out artistic experiments, strengthen
theoretical research, make the artistic creation flourish, develop an art that shows
national characteristics and distinctive features of the zeitgeist, (an art) that shows
a large variety of subjects, forms and styles; we strengthen the international
exchange and we fight for the establishment of a strong socialist and modem
2
(Four Modernizations) nation in our country."
The "experiments" that artists were asked to carry out were in theory in support of the
practical Four Modernizations (science and technology, agriculture, defense, and
industry), but the caveat that "artistic creation [should] flourish" implies considerable
latitude and a departure from socialist realist artistic orthodoxy. As such, the official art
world actually encouraged and made room for unofficial experimentations, resulting in
an artistic milieu defined more by experimental trends than an official-unofficial
dichotomy.
IIt Ibid
I12 Statutes of the Chinese Artists' Association, 9/11 /1978, quoted in Koppel-Yang, Semiotic Warfare, 45.
72
The Pond Society and experimentation in local niches
The atomized Chinese art world that existed under the aegis of the centralized
institutional structure is an important context for the experimentation in new media art
that took place during the 1980s. As in other realms of intellectual and academic
exploration at this time, artists tended to coalesce around quasi-entrepreneurial ventures.
The activity around Hangzhou in the mid-1980s, comprised mainly of graduates of the
Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts, is an interesting example of the blossoming of an avantgarde in the semi-official art world. Responding to the mainstream Sixth National Fine
Art Exhibition, held in 1984, recent graduate Zhang Peili and other artists asserted that
the avant-garde experimental art needed a presence in the exhibition circuit and formed
an unofficial collective to help direct official attention and funds in that direction. The
collective was almost immediately contacted by the Zhejiang Chapter of the Chinese
Artists' Association and offered an unofficial exhibition."
3
Taking the name the Society
of Young Artists, Zhang and his colleagues, including Song Ling, Zha Li, and Geng
Jianyi, prepared for a year for an exhibition they titled '85New Space ('85 Xin Kongian,
2 faI). The Artists' Association even rented two houses and provided art supplies for the
collective to support the creation of new work as well as the orchestration of the
exhibition. The young artists, including Zhang Peili, were mostly oil painters, and
somewhat ideologically inclined toward the existential philosophy of Sartre with an
interest in Heidegger as well as Wittgenstein's explorations of logic and language. Despite
these affiliations, there was no group manifesto or overarching style until disagreements
among the artists resulted in the codification of the exhibition's general direction, "...to
11 Shijiu, trans. Kela Shang, "On New Space and the Pond Society (1987), first published in The Trend of
Art Thought [Meishu ShichaoJ, 1987, no.1:16-21., reprinted in Contemporary Chinese Art: PrinmayDocuments, eds.
Wu Hung and Peggy Wang (New York: Museum of Modem Art, 2010), 86.
73
convey the 'sense of modern' [sic] through strengthening formal languages and restricting
[explicit] expression."
14
'85 New Space and the support that it generated from the official
art world was thus a somewhat controlled experiment for the artists and the Artists'
Association as well as a platform for communication between the younger generation and
official artist-cadres. The results were an exhibition that received mixed reviews but
substantial media attention in the mainstream publications Art and Fine Art in China.
This coalition provided the short-term conditions that young artists needed to
propel themselves from the world of the art student to the world of the professional artist
while skirting fully-official status or personal membership in the Artists' Association.
They were avoiding the career path of the official Chinese artist by not joining the
C.A.A., marking this as an experiment and a transition. The temporary coalition also
provided the experience of maintaining a loosely structured organization, which in turn
gave rise to the artistic collective The Pond Society (Chi she,
"#), formed in 1986 after
the Society of Young Artists had disbanded following the close of the '85New Space
exhibition. In the formation of The Pond Society, we see the coalescing of a group ideal
and philosophical orientation. The concept of the pond was linked to the group's interest
in immersion in artistic exploration and the amorphous and unknowable, indefinable
nature of art. The group's manifesto further asserted the abandonment of an attempt to
master artistic techniques, specifically easel painting, instead moving to ill-defined "artistic
activity" that explored many media as a way of communicating through visual
language. 115
I4Ibid
IL5
Ibid, 87.
74
The Pond Society and the direction that it took with respect to new media
experimentation is of key importance to the next chapter and its discussion of Zhang
Peili's early video art. This group and its progression from the academy to an affiliation
with the official Artists' Association, to staking its own claim on a new, experimental set of
"artistic activities," is also an important case study in our examination of the liminal space
occupied by semi-official academic and artistic organizations throughout twentieth
century China. The seeming protection that became available to the avant-garde, and
the space for controversial art within the sphere of official policy and academic activity is
an exceptional and powerful development that places artistic experimentation within the
purview of specifically Chinese modem academic scholarship.
Eremitic Participation in the Semi-Official Art World
This chapter has provided a broad overview of the academic world of twentieth
century China, with specific attention to the role of the semi-official institutions that
populated the intellectual landscape in the Republican and Reform Eras. The founding
of the nation's art academies as part of the Republican Era's wide-reaching New Culture
Movement, based on educational theories of Kantian pedagogues like Cai Yuanpei and
the European academic models that individual artists encountered during their studies
abroad, is an important point of departure for understanding the role of art and aesthetic
education in China's self-conscious intellectual modernization. The continuing and
exacting standards of the academic tradition speak to art students' place in the nation's
elite academic community. As such, the world of the Republican Era needs to be taken
into account as part of the creation story of the modem Chinese experimental artist.
75
The New Culture Movement's push for a new nationalism was originally tinged
with a pro-Western, pro-science approach to developing a robust, modern, Chinese
academic community. By the 1930s, the original idealistic momentum of this movement,
set in motion by leaders who were originally born into the Qing scholar-gentry class, had
fizzled among the students who had been educated during the later years of Republican
political turmoil. These students were in general personally disillusioned with the goals of
the New Culture Movement, and identified more with the traditional Confucian model of
a melancholic, alienated scholar who withdraws from public life and writes in coded
language about the corruption of politics in order to amonish the government and ruling
elite. The college and university environments at this time sheltered students and
professors who rediscovered and celebrated figures from diverse moments of a dynastic
Chinese history who had been previously dismissed as anti-modern and anti-scientific by
the scientistic iconoclasts of the New Culture Movement.
Among these students drawn to scholarly admonition in the 1930s were scholars
who later became Party leaders, including the philosopher and historian Hu Sheng. Hu
was a senior official in Deng Xiaoping's administration who served as the president of
CASS in the 1980s and as such set the tone for much academic research and communitybuilding during the Reform Era. Despite his loyalty to the Party, he promoted
inconsistent policy that changed in a matter of months from a call to open China's
research purview to include liberal, bourgeois topics to a proscription of research that did
not include a practical application of Marxist doctrine. This alignment with prevailing
political trends, implied Hu's personal skepticism at the Party's interference in the world
of academia despite his proclivity for a rapprochement with China's non-Marxist history.
76
This intellectual environment, colored by leaders like Hu who had come of age in
a time when scholarly debates were often conducted in coded language meant only for
the initiated academics and not their politically-oriented administrators, gave rise to a
multiplicity of semi-official academic organizations in the 1980s. These institutions,
publications, and collectives began to define a nonofficial, quasi-public intellectual sphere
that piggy-backed on the curricular experimentation and academic vitality of the mid1980s and the Party's desire to align itself with the nation's intellectual leadership. The
art academies similarly became hubs through which nonofficial groups and organizations
could convene.
As examined in this chapter, a clear example of the negotiation of a heretofore
uncharted liminal space occurred in Hangzhou in 1985 with the unofficial Society of
Young Artists, the group of recent art school graduates who obtained sponsorship from
the provincial branch of the official Chinese Artists' Association to develop their
exhibition '85 Art Space. This group of experimental artists who had gained official
attention by speaking out against the mainstream art being exhibited in official venues
eventually segued into The Pond Society, an avant-garde collective of critical importance
to the experimental new media art work that is at the heart of this dissertation.
The following chapter will explore how The Pond Society fostered the early video
art of Zhang Peili and became part of the negotiation of nonofficial space for dissident
and admonitory art in the 1980s. Despite the surface-level philosophical affiliations with
diverse modem and contemporary Western schools of philosophic and literary thought,
the persistent trope of the melancholic, withdrawn eremite is a powerful continuation of
the Confucian modes of protest explored in conjunction with the negotiation of
modernity in China throughout the twentieth century. As described by Xu Bing in the
77
quote that opened this chapter, the seminars, discussions, and reading material that
flooded the intellectual sphere in the 1980s was overwhelming and even "boring" since
the abundant and conflicting viewpoints were an unedited mass of history and theory
from all the previously "closed" decades. Xu Bing's reaction to the feverish consumption
of intellectual flotsam and jetsam will prove to be an important consideration with respect
to the value and resonance of the eremitic model of the Confucian scholar-artist in the
realm of experimental new media art.
Chapter 3
Academic Media in Modern China, the Art Academy in the
People's Republic, and Wu Shanzhuan's Installation Art
There i... something that apainter can learn. Let him read ten thousand volumes and walk ten thousand
miles. All these will wash away the turgid matters of the mundane world and helpform the hills and
valleys within his bosom. Once he has made these preparationswithin himsey, whatever he sketches and
paints will be able to convej the spiritof the mountains and rivers. 116
-Dong Qichang, 1630
Technique is the basis of a professional,but what is more important is an artistwith a spiritualand
generous heart, with sinceresentiment, who i continually searching and thereby creatingreal beauty. 117
- Lin Fengmian, 1930s
It is rightfor... artists to study... artistic creation, but the science of Marxism-Leninism must be studied
by all revolutionaries... Artists should study... the various classes in society, theirmutual relations and
respective conditions, theirphysiognomy and psychology. 118
-Mao Zedong, 1942
Literature and art are the concerns of artists and writers themselves. If the party gives too specific a
leadership to literatureand art, then literatureand art will stagnate. 119
-Zhao Dan, 1980
I believe art is a silent ocean ... It is a static,formless, empty box - it must accept absolutel anything
20
from absolutely anyone, and it is destined never to befulL Its strength is in nothingness...1
- Wu Shanzhuan, 1986
These statements on the nature of art and the mindset of the artist reflect the wide
conceptual deviations about art and education in twentieth century China, occasionally
as mined from much earlier periods. Lin Fengmian's quote from the early twentieth
116Dong Qichang, Huazhi, in Dong Qichang, Rongtai (1630), quoted in Li Chu-Tsing, "The Artistic
Theories of the Literati," in The Chinese Scholar's Studio: Artistic Life in the Late Ming Period: an Exhibitionfrom the
ShanghaiMuseun, eds. Li Chu-Tsing, andJames C. Y. Watt (New York, N.Y.: Thames and Hudson, 1987),
17.
"17Lin Fengmian, quoted in Christopher Crouch, Contemporary Chinese Visual Culture: Tradition,Moderniy, and
Globalization(Amherst, N.Y.: Cambria Press, 2010), 176.
118 Mao Zedong, "Talks at the Yan'an Forum on Literature and Art (May 1942)," in Modern Chinese Literary
Thought: Writings on Literature, 1893-1945, ed. Kirk A. Denton (Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press,
1996), 463.
I19 Zhao Dan in The People's Daily (Renmin Ribao), 8 October 1980, quoted in Dictionay of the Political
Thought of the Peoples Republic of China, ed. Henry Yuhuai He (Armonk, N.Y.: M.E. Sharpe, 2001), 627.
120 Wu Shanzhuan, "Silent Ocean, Blind Ocean, Genderless Ocean (1986, unpublished)" in Wu Shanzhuan:
Red HurnourInternational(Hong Kong: Asia Art Archive, 2005), Insert, Artists' Writings 02.
79
century speaks to the modernist ideals and personalized missions that he felt were
necessary for artists to internalize as part of their education. Mao's quote from his
address on the arts at the Communist Party's revolutionary headquarters in Yan'an in
1942 reflects an entirely different directive. The idea that artists must study Marxist
political theory and the classes that they should serve became the overarching goal of art
education during the People's Republic era, accompanied by strict prescriptions for style
and subject matter. Yet by the Reform Era beginning in the late 1970s, Zhao Dan (19151980), a famous film actor and Party member, was one of many voices advocating for
increased artistic independence. Wu Shanzhuan's quote about art as an autonomous
"silent ocean" reflects his own formation as an artist during the same period and the
profound influence that he felt not from the Ministry of Culture or his art teachers but
from the influx of texts on Western philosophy in the 1980s. In his case, he was
extremely influenced by the work of Karl Popper and his division of the world into
ontological sub-worlds including "the world of the products of the human mind" called
World 3. Wu's independent and extra-curricular reading that contributed to his artistic
development cannot be understood without also acknowledging an extremely well known
prescription by the late Ming literatus Dong Qichang (1555-1636) that extensive reading
and travel were a crucial part of an artists' moral and intellectual development. This
chapter builds on the overarching thesis of this dissertation that the Confucian conception
of the artist as a moral intellectual who has "...read ten thousand books and walk[ed] ten
thousand miles,"121 had much bearing on the development of experimental art practice
during China's Reform Era. A colossal figure in the history of Chinese art as a painter,
calligrapher, connoisseur, and theorist, Dong's influence was unavoidable during the
121 Dong
Qchang, Huadhi, 17.
80
Reform Era when classical Chinese texts were slowly re-emerging in academic spheres.
Indeed, Dong's theories of artistic growth through study and exposure were actively
revived during this period and became important factors in the academic environment
developed at the Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts (ZAFA) during Wu's tenure there.
This chapter will explore academic art mediums throughout the twentieth century
as a means for engaging the early installation works of Wu Shanzhuan and the context of
his artistic coming of age at ZAFA in Hangzhou in the 1980s. The specific conditions
surrounding Wu's experimentation with the medium of installation are important to our
investigation of the admonitory nature of these early works and the admonitory gesture of
pursuing a non-academic medium in the Reform Era. Of the three artists that form the
heart of this study, Wu most directly engages the chaotic visual environment of China in
the late twentieth century, through the medium of installation art new to the Chinese art
scene at this time. Before discussing the individual case of Wu Shanzhuan, it is extremely
helpful to investigate the environment at the Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts specifically
during his tenure there in the 1980s, with respect to its important position in the history
of twentieth century China. It is my contention that the intellectual environment at
ZAFA and its self-conscious identity as a progressive and liberal institution was an
important part of the art education undertaken by Wu Shanzhuan and his colleagues in
the 1980s, influencing their predecessors as well. The previous chapter explored the
connection between the generation coming of age in the 1930s and the generation of the
'85 New Wave, with specific attention to the preservation of Confucian ethics and
morality in amidst a climate of modernization and Westernization. This chapter will
explore the key contributions of Lin Fengmian and his work in art education in the 1930s
and Zheng Shengtian's role at the art academy in the 1980s. It will also bridge the gap
81
between these two eras by examining the relative importance of Confucian remonstration
in the People's Republic Era, from its foundation in the 1940s through the Cultural
Revolution (1966-1976). The educational praxis at ZAFA and the ideological
connotations of specific art media play a key role in understanding the import of Wu
Shanzhuan's adoption of installation art in the 1980s.
Fairyland, Woodcuts, and the Avant-Garde in the 1930s
ZAFA and the Central Academy of Fine Arts (CAFA) are exceptional in the
history of art and ideas not just because they are considered the most elite arts education
institutions in China, but because they are the two art academies that have been
supervised directly by the State Ministry of Culture, and as such have an even more
direct relationship to national cultural policies than other educational institutions in
China.122 As described in the previous chapter, ZAFA and CAFA were founded by the
artists Lin Fengmian and Xu Beihong, respectively, both in collaboration with the
educator Cai Yuanpei, all of whom had studied in Europe. These pedagogues were
oriented toward the particular versions of Western modem visual idioms that appealed to
them personally, but the programs at the academies were fairly uniform in their modern
academic approach to art education. This rejected the Confucian model of passing a
master's style to his students in favor of distributed and progressive pedagogy. Despite
the wide Western art historical gap between Xu's attachment to a variation of nineteenth
century academic realism and Lin's proclivity for Impressionism, these two oil painters
were both part of liberal, progressive, and Western-oriented educational methodologies.
22
Zheng Shengtian, "Brushes are Weapons," in Art in Turmoil: The Chinese CulturalRevolution, 1966-76, eds.
Richard King, Ralph C. Croizier, Scott Watson, and Zheng Shengtian (Vancouver: University of British
Columbia Press, 2010), 95.
1
82
At ZAFA, the progressive theoretical underpinnings of the curriculum were tied to
political action from the early days of the institution. The formation of revolutionary
student groups like the Art Society of the Eighteenth at West Lake in 1929, the eighteenth
year of the Republic of China, was a direct reaction to Lu Xun's 1927 call for the
adoption of woodblock prints as the medium of the Communist movement.123 This
politically radical element advocated woodblock prints as an art form with the potential
for mass production and a suitable medium to depict the suffering and exploitation of
workers and peasants under capitalism. The majority of the students and faculty at
ZAFA, including Lin Fengmian, were neither radical nor allied with the Communist
cause but the establishment of this type of revolutionary student group with the
encouragement of Lin was indicative of the overall spirit of experimentation at the
academy from its very inception. The political goals of the group, however, quickly
became dangerous for the academy, and several society members were expelled later that
year for "political reasons," with other active communists expelled in 1932.124
The expulsion of art students affiliated with Communist politics in the 1930s is an
important precedent for the academy's plasticity and ability to absorb or reject ostensibly
non-academic impulses. Unsurprisingly, the Art Society of the Eighteenth, dropping the
reference to Hangzhou's West Lake, continued its operations outside of the academy after
the expulsion of some of its members. The Society moved most of its activities to
Shanghai, and linked up with Lu Xun and likeminded art students from the Shanghai
College of Art, although independent from any art school. Lu Xun had already devoted
23
1
Sullivan, Art andArtists of Twentieth-Centuy China, 82.
'pibayishe'," [Lu Xun and the Art Society of the Eighteenth], in Meishu, 1979, vols.
124 "Lu Xun xianshengyu
1
and 2, reprinted in Paintersand Politics in the People'sRepublic of China, 1949-1979 byJulia F. Andrews
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 14.
839
many years to studying theories of art and aesthetics in order to be able to articulate the
needs of a new national art movement, and had become part of Shanghai's cosmopolitan
nouveau-literati scene upon his move there in 1927.125 Lu became close friends with
Uchiyama Kanzo, ajapanese-bom bookshop owner who frequently hosted Lu and the
Art Society of the Eighteenth in the rooms above his store as well as sponsoring art
exhibitions. 126 By the early 1930s, Lu had translated several books on modem and
Western art into Chinese, including Itagaki Takao's Japanese text, History ofModern Art,
which narrated a history of Western art from the French Revolution to the early
twentieth century that relied heavily on Alois Riegl's theories. Lu was especially
interested in Riegl's articulation of kunstwollen, the specific will-to-art of a given time and
place that explained stylistic and mediatic developments in terms of the historical
conditions in which they developed.127 His own personal inclination toward woodblock
prints was an interest that began when he studied injapan in the early 1900s and
matured in the late 1920s and early 1930s while in Shanghai with Uchiyama.
The long history of printed images in Chinese culture was another factor
contributing to Lu's enthusiasm for the woodblock print. In light of the technical ability
to produce and circulate prints in China from as early as the seventh century, when Tang
dynasty Buddhist images and texts were printed in large quantities, the medium itself was
not novel in the early twentieth century. It was the attention paid to printmaking as a fine
arts medium, both in the academies and in Lu's and Uchiyama's Shanghai salon, that
makes this particular moment in Chinese print culture important to our discussion of
125
126
Andrews, Paintersand Politics, 81.
Christopher T. Keaveney, Beond Brushtalk: Sino-JapaneseLiteray Exchange in the IntenvarPeriod (Hong Kong:
Hong Kong University Press, 2009), 39.
127
Sullivan, Art andArtists of Twentieth-Century China, 82.
84
experimentation in new media in twentieth century China. The techniques of woodblock
printmaking as taught by Uchiyama Kaikichi were different from the dominant artisanal
printmaking methods in China. Uchiyama's modernist commitment was based on the
idea that one artist would compose and execute each print from start to finish, whereas in
Chinese andJapanese tradition a team of workers would participate, each having distinct
and limited role in commercial print production. Lu was convinced that the kunstwollen of
modern China pointed to the woodblock print as the art of the moment. As with the
vernacular literature that he promoted as a writer, he felt that woodcuts were a medium
with mass appeal, both because they were relatively cheap to make and distribute and
because of the expressionistic potential of black and white compositions. He was
particularly drawn to the woodblock prints of his contemporaries in Germany, especially
the work of Kathe Kollwitz, an artist with whom Lu corresponded personally:128
... the works of Kathe Kollwitz show that there are others "injured and
insulted" like us in many places of the earth as well as artists who mourn, protest
and struggle on their behalf ... [and portray] a different kind of people, not
"heroes" perhaps, but more approachable and sympathetic...1 29
Kollwitz' compelling subject matter depicting social injustice inflicted upon peasants and
workers in dramatic situations, composed in a limited palette of black, white, and gray,
was for Lu an ideal confluence of form and content. This segued well with his interest in
Soviet Marxist art theory and his translation of the theories of Georgy Plekhanov and
Anatoly Lunacharsky, both of whom argued for the development of art and aesthetics
that was fused with the "realism" of class consciousness and proletarian sympathies.1 30
Lu's personal investment in the creation of the leftist avant-garde woodcut
movement in the 1930s extended beyond the introduction of foreign theorists and artists
128 Barbara McCloskey, Artists of World War II(Westport, Conn: Greenwood Press, 2005), 5.
129LU Xun, Quoted in Ibid
130 Sullivan, Art andArtists of Twentieth-Century China, 82.
85
into the Chinese art scene to the promotion of the medium through education. He
organized study classes through his group the Left-Wing League of Writers, including the
Summer Literature and Art Study class, a politically oriented investigation of art history
attended by many members of the Art Society of the Eighteenth in 1930.131 Lu's
educational program also sometimes ventured into the realm of studio instruction, most
notably in August of 1931 when Lu and Uchiyama collaborated to bring the bookseller's
younger brother Uchiyama Kaikichi from the Seijo Institute in Tokyo to teachJapanese
woodblock printmaking techniques. This short course consisted of the printmaker
lecturing and demonstrating in Japanese with Lu Xun serving as translator. The very
basic techniques were conveyed in one day, and the remainder of the week-long
workshop was devoted to practice, along with lectures by Lu Xun that presented inspiring
print works like Kollwitz' Peasant War series of etchings and aquatints from 1902-1908.132
That Lu Xun was fostering an alternative educational venue to the art academy at
this time is interesting for our study of admonition and art media for several reasons.
First, there was certainly an admonitory overtone to the work that Lu promoted, but it
was a straightforward, international, Marxist brand of remonstration that is not similar to
the Confucian-infused admonition explored by the artists at the heart of this study. Lu's
written descriptions of social injustices were made emphasized by the formal elements in
the woodcut prints he promoted: the stark contrast of black and white hues were designed
to have wide appeal, and wide circulation. One example of these works is Scuffle (1933)
by Zheng Yefu (1909-1974), the author of an instructional book on how to make
LU Peng. A history of art in 20th-Century China (Milano: Charta, 2010), 340.
13 2 Ibid., 341 and Keaveney, Bgond Brushtal, 39.
1s1
86
woodblock prints and proprietor of the China Woodcut Supplies Collective Factory.13 3
This image of a street demonstration and the clash between the protesters and police uses
thick lines and harsh diagonals to convey a sense of unease and struggle, and
undifferentiated facial rendering to enforce the class-based rather than individualistic
struggle at hand.
The robust woodcut movement that grew out of Lu Xun and Uchiyama's salon
environment in 1920s Shanghai created work that served as a fiery call-to-arms and
angry outcry at proletarian suffering in China and around the world. Its anti-traditional
orientation stood in opposition to the type of Confucian-inspired scholarship that was
contemporaneously being explored in universities and academies during the 1930s,
highlighted in the previous chapter. Secondly, it is important to understand the political
positioning of this informal study group with respect to the relatively neutral environment
at the academy. The history of Modem art in Europe is predicated on avant-garde
artists' rejection of or from mainstream academic institutions and exhibitions, but this
separation was one of degree rather than fundamental principles. The Left-Wing League
of Artists, as the group associated with Lu Xun-came to call themselves, was formed after
the expulsion of radical students from the National Hangzhou Art School (ZAFA's
original name), but the group did not sever its ties with academia. The academy and its
leaders remained aware of the group's activities and print exhibitions in Shanghai, and
the group repeatedly invited Lin Fengmian to support, endorse, orjoin their
133 Christer von der Burg, An Bin, and Hwang Yin, The Art of Contemporar Chinese Woodcuts (hongguo Dang
Dai Mu Ban Ti Shu) (London: Muban Foundation, 2003), 45.
87
movement.134 Thus, the Art Society of the Eighteenth and the Left-Wing League of
Artists were not anti-academy so much as they were anti-capitalism.
In Hangzhou, Lin Fengmian along with Cai Yuanpei had founded their academy
with the goal to, "introduce Western art, reorganize Chinese art, synthesize Chinese and
Western art, and create an art for the present epoch."
35
In theory, this is quite similar to
Lu Xun's goal for the Left-Wing League of Artists, minus his Communist agenda. Lu's
preface to a 1931 exhibition of woodblock prints by the Art Society of the Eighteenth,
stated his understanding of Chinese art as divided into two distinct categories, the art of
the oppressed (woodblock prints) and the art of the oppressors (ink painting), an implicit
criticism of the mainstream art academies and their elite faculty and students.13 6 That
Lu's group was made up entirely of such elites, some of whom were still studying at the
criticized academies escaped mention. The fact that the academy was able to
accommodate students of varied political and intellectual affiliations is what recommends
it as an important part of this history of avant-garde art movements in China.
Lin Fengmian himself was oriented towards Western Modern art; specifically oil
painting styles from France such as Fauvism and Impressionism. While the academy's
curriculum certainly reflected this affinity, it was promoted within a context of freedom
and choice. Lin's guiding belief was that the academy should foster "freedom of thought,
harmony, and coexistence,"137 an application of Confucian principles on maintaining a
peaceful society. The manifestation of this belief was Lin's unique pedagogy that allowed
for openness and experimentation rather than rigid specialization. There were two
3 Sullivan, Art andArtists of Twentieth-Centuy China, 82.
135 Andrews, Painters and Politics, 28.
136 Ibid., 44
137 Crouch, Contemporay Chinese Fisual Culture, 170.
88
dominant departments, Chinese painting (guohua, 4 A) and Western oil painting (xihua,
47 A), but students were encouraged to experiment with both, even comparing the two
traditions in the same studio. The Western painting department offered foundational
instruction in the Beaux-Arts academic tradition but students were also encouraged to
experiment in modem styles. Perhaps most significantly, students were given a great deal
of autonomy in choosing their courses and professors throughout their academic careers,
unlike the more traditional academic practice of choosing one medium in which to
specialize after a few initial years of foundational education, or the traditional Confucian
model of constraining one's practice to the style of one's teacher. 138 Like Cai Yuanpei,
Lin believed that the academy would function best when all students felt they had
independence and freedom and were committed to ethical behavior when interacting
with their immediate community and the nation as a whole. The environment of
experimentation and tolerant coexistence in the art studios contributed to Lin's vision of
developing a new generation of artists whose practice would contribute to addressing
wider social issues of the new nation, but that contribution could not be direct or
instrumental. Lin felt that the academy had to be slightly insulated from the most heated
political activity of the day, hence the expulsion of some of the most zealous members of
the Art Society of the Eighteenth. Lin and Cai felt that the preconditions for shaping true
citizen artists would be to allow them to synthesize their own personal style and mission,
and most importantly Lin felt that to become an artist, one had to have "a free heart." 139
Lin did believe that Chinese artists needed to become aware of the art movements going
on in Europe, but he used a slightly less heavy hand than Lu Xun. His compilation Arts
138 Ibid.,
is9
173.
Ibid, 172.
99
from Around the World in 1935, for example, was more or less devoted to art in France,
Belgium, and Germany, but it covered a variety of developments in modem art and
reported on a comprehensive listing of exhibitions, giving a sense of the breadth of
European artistic activity. 4 0 Rather than being an arbiter of taste, Lin functioned as a
moderator of aesthetic and ideological debates, as remembered by the guohua ink painter
Deng Bai:
At that time, abstractionists were arguing with realists, but Mr. Lin seemed to
transcend all of it, he did not support one or the other, deprecating neither; but
both sides of the debating students all felt that Principal Lin had taken care of
them, and belonged to them. Each student group was clarifying their point of
view by exhibitions and publications. The students were alwaysfantastically busy
thinking and making; the school was an artfaiyland with itsfteedom.141
It is ostensibly this "fairlyand" environment that Lu and his followers took issue with, as it
offended their Marxist sensibilities to live in a fantasy world insulated from the social
injustices of the day. The disdain at the elite freedom to pick and choose from any
number of academic mediums, rather than channeling the kunstwollen of modem China,
led Lu to encourage an exclusive practice of woodcut printmaking.
This protected exploration of artistic mediums at the academy, in parallel with the
leftist woodcut print movement outside of the academy, established the variations in the
concept of modem and avant-garde Chinese art among the cultural elite in the 1920s and
1930s. It should be noted that printmaking was offered as a course of study at the
academy from its inception, although the majority of students focused on painting. But
even within the academy, printmaking expanded throughout the 1930s as student interest
grew in response to Lu Xun and the Left-Wing League of Artists. The woodcut
movement, starting outside the academy, was thus incorporated into academic
140 Frank Dik6tter, The Age of Openness: China Before Mao (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 60.
141 Deng Bai, quoted in Crouch, Contemporay Chinese Visual Culture, 174. My italics.
90
discussions and experimentation, and many of the movement's key figures were graduates
and faculty of the academies in Hangzhou, Shanghai, and Beijing. This plasticity of the
academy's curriculum reflects the conceptual foundations Lin Fengmian and Cai
Yuanpei ascribed to art and aesthetic education, clearly articulated in the epigram by Lin:
"Technique is the basis of a professional, but what is more important is an artist with a
spiritual and generous heart, with sincere sentiment, who is continually searching and
thereby creating real beauty."142
By incorporating Lu and Uchiyama's modernist notions of the print as the
product of an individual rather than a workshop and a fine art rather than a commercial
craft, the academies played an important role in the pluralization of Chinese modern art
mediums. While Lu promoted the collectivity of the woodblock "movement," the
production modality was that of the single artist rather than a collective. Academies
contributed to pluralization in Chinese art by absorbing the medium of the print as
another means to convey an artist's "sincere sentiment" as articulated by Lin. The
modernization of China's education system and Cai's 1917 call to replace religion with
aesthetic education, is in effect all part of a project that would pluralize the discussion of
ethics, morality, and aesthetics by broadening the conversation to include more art forms
and more practitioners than traditional Confucian literati culture had allowed. It is a
reassessment of this mentality of pluralization that took place in the 1980s that made the
experimentation of Wu Shanzhuan possible, and the activity of the intervening decades
that makes it remarkable.
14 2
Lin Fengmian, quoted in Crouch, Contemporar Chinese Visual Culture,176.
91
Mao's Talks at Yan'an and Art Academies in the People's Republic
It is the ultimate triumph of the Communist Party and the establishment of the
People's Republic of China in 1949 that gave Lu Xun and the woodcut movement iconic
status and importance in the nation's art education system. Whereas printmaking had
been an option as a course of study in the 1930s, this discipline was heavily promoted and
the departments formalized in the 1950s and early 1960s, when the academies became
much more rigid in their instruction in both form and content. The directives for these
educational institutions in the People's Republic were mostly honed during the years of
the Anti-Japanese War (1937-1945) in the inland city of Yan'an, Shaanxi Province, which
served as the headquarters of the Chinese Communist Party during the war years. The
Communist Party founded its own ideologically driven art school, the Lu Xun Art
Academy, in Yan'an in 1938 in order to train artists to execute propaganda art as part of
the war effort.
3
In addition to specialized courses in art topics like the laws of
composition and color science, all students underwent compulsory instruction in
Marxism-Leninism, in the history of the Chinese Communist Party, and in the materialist
conception of history. 1 " While the activity at the Lu Xun Art Academy resulted in the
practical and ideological training of artists, there was still an amount of exploration
reminiscent of the broad sources enlisted by Lin Fengmian as teaching tools in
Hangzhou. Lu Xun's translation of Itagaki's history of modern art in the West was still
widely read and discussed, and illustrations and prints of Auguste Rodin and Paul
C6zanne were exhibited on separate occasions, reflecting the enduring fascination with
43
The Lu Xun Art Academy relocated to Shenyang, Liaoning Province in 1946 and renamed the Lu Xun
Academy of Fine Art, its current designation, in 1958.
4 Li, A history of art in 20th-Century China, 363.
92
modem artistic variants on realism, impressionism, post-impressionism, expressionism,
and romanticism. 14 5
This persistent fascination with modernism writ large was halted in 1942 after the
public declaration of the Party's cultural policy by Mao at the Yan'an Forum on Art and
Literature. This was a watershed moment, part of the larger Rectification Campaign of
1942-1944, that divorced the Party from the generalized modernist inquiries of the May
4f Movement, and redirected future efforts towards a specifically Communist vision of
modern China. Mao's dictates were aimed at establishing a clear hierarchy that placed
art in a subordinate role to other aspects of the revolution: "We do not support excessive
emphasis on the importance of literature and art, nor do we support their
underestimation. Literature and art are subordinate to politics, and yet in turn exert
enormous influence on it."14 Mao was vague with regards to the specific mediums and
genres of revolutionary art, but articulate about the source material that he felt would
generate a new Chinese artistic tradition:
Rich deposits of literature and art actually exist in popular life itself: they are
things in their natural forms, crude but also extremely lively, rich, and
fundamental; they make all processed forms of literature pale in comparison, they
14 7
are the sole and inexhaustible source of processed forms of literature and art.
The popular life he referred to was a specifically domestic one, an important part of his
overall plan to steer the nation's focus away from cosmopolitan concerns and toward a
self-contained Chinese sphere, albeit by appropriated the Socialist Realist idiom from the
Soviet Union. Lastly, it is important to note that Mao's policy was completely dependent
upon the concept of mass control and ownership:
1 Ibid.
*4McDougall and Mao, Mao Zedong's "Talks at the Yanan Conference on LiteratureandArt", 75.
147 Ibid, 69.
93
Whatever genuinely belongs to the masses must be under the leadership of the
popular masses. New literature and art, which are part of new culture, are
naturally in the same category. We do not by any means refuse to use the old
forms of the feudal class and the bourgeoisie, but in our hands these old forms are
reconstructed and filled with new content, so that they become revolutionary and
serve the people.148
Essentially, Mao was establishing an artistic modality in which there was no room for art
for art's sake. Every work, whether executed in a "lively" vernacular medium or an "old
form of the feudal class" would need to be ideologically sound and aimed at an audience
of "the people," specifically, peasants, proletarian workers, and soldiers.
Despite this apparent tolerance for artwork in a variety of styles so long as it was
designed for the masses, Mao definitively endorsed one style as the visual embodiment of
party values when he simply stated, "We are advocates of socialist realism."
14 9
This style
was defined in the regulations of the Soviet Writer's Union in 1934, a document that
served as an important conceptual sourcebook for Chinese artists in the 1940s and 1950s:
...the basic tool of Soviet literature and Soviet literary criticism... [whereby]
artist[s] describe truthfully, historically, and concretely from the perspective of
the revolutionary development of reality. At the same time, the authenticity and
specific historical situations described by art must be combined with the task of
ideologically transforming and educating the working people using the socialist
spirit.150
Academic curricula were revamped after the establishment of the People's
Republic, essentially implementing a "Sovietization" that advocated the refined academic
rendering of socialist subject matter in a style drawn from both contemporaneous Soviet
Socialist Realist painters and from a nineteenth century source: the Russian painters
known as The Wanderers. This group of painters, including Ilya Repin (1844-1930) and
148Ibid. 65
149Mao Zedong, from the Talks at the Yan'an Forum on Art and Literature (1942), quoted in Gao Minglu,
Total Moderniy and the Avant-Garde in Twentieth-Centuy ChineseArt (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 2011), 44.
150 Beijing Normal University Literature and Art Theory Group, ed., Reference MaterialsforLiterature Theory
Study (Wenxue lilun xuexi cankao ziliao), (classified materials), (Beijing: Higher Education Publishing House,
1956 edition), 648, cited in Li, A history of art in 20th-Century China, 497.
94
Ivan Kramskoi (1837-1887), had attended the St. Petersburg Academy of Fine Art
(although Kramskoi and several other members of the group had been expelled due to
their disagreements with academic policies), and were inspired by the radical writer
Nikolay Chernyshevsky. Chernyshevsky's work The Aesthetic Relations ofArt to Realit0 (1855)
was especially important in both nineteenth century Russia and mid-twentieth century
China for its straightforward appeal that art should draw attention to real suffering in the
world.151
In addition to Russian painters becoming the acknowledged "classical" models
that Chinese painters studied, the teaching techniques of the St. Petersburg academician
Pavel Chistyakov (1832-1919), presented directly from Soviet textbooks, became
dominant in Chinese art classrooms. These methods stressed learning to see objects as a
combination of forms, with stress on the junctions between different shapes in the
composition of any object or figure. This method was criticized as overly mechanical by
the realist Xu Beihong, who remained the titular director at CAFA until his death in
1954, but Party Officials were installed after 1949 to assure compliance with the Yan'an
protocols.1 5 2 Lin Fengmian remained on the faculty at the academy in Hangzhou until
1951, but his affinity for modernist painting and his methods of encouraging individual
choice and experimentation brought him under fire, and he left the school after enduring
public criticism as a "formalist."1 53
In addition to the sharp turn toward Socialist Realism in painting and the
continued promotion of woodblock printmaking as a revolutionary medium, the PRC
academies introduced a few other genres as part of their courses of study, most notably
151 La, A history of art in 20th-Centuy China, 497.
152 Ibid,496.
153 Crouch, Contemporay Chinese Visual Culture, 175.
95
the folk art tradition of nianhua (4 A), new year's prints. Lin's replacement at the
academy in Hangzhou wasJiang Feng, a Communist artist who had joined the Party in
Yan'an. Jiang implemented many ideological changes at the academy, from compulsory
Marxist studies, to requiring students to do fieldwork with peasants and factory workers,
to requiring all faculty to live on campus. Jiang, who had joined the faculty of the
academy as part of the Military Control Commission in 1949 prior to assuming the role
of president, was also eager to implement the directive from the Ministry of Culture that
same year to reinvigorate the traditional folk art of nianhua to "serve as.. .propaganda for
the ideology of people's democracy.... [and] emphasize and express the new and joyful
lives and struggles of the working people."15, Jiang organized three nianhua-based"mass
art activities" on the Hangzhou campus from 1949 to 1950. These activities required the
participation of students from all disciplines, and the second and third iterations of the
project involved students working on farms and in factories to collect source material for
their compositions prior to beginning the design process.'
55
It is crucial for our understanding of the uptake of non-academic media to study
the policy and curricular shifts at the nation's art academies, specifically the academy in
Hangzhou, in the People's Republic Era. Lin's goal of cultivating artists who had found
their own personal means of expression, supported by appropriate technical and
philosophical education, was supplanted by the Yan'an-infused Party directives that
strove for artistic coherence. The Soviet instructional methods were just one means by
which the Party implemented a total Marxist educational idiom. It is the transformation
54
Lu, A history of art in 20th-Century China, 453.
155 Andrews, Paintersand Politics, 45.
1
of these educational idioms into an ideological environment during the Cultural
Revolution that had the most impact during the 1980s Reform Era.
The Academy in the Visual Chaos of the Cultural Revolution
The policies and practices of the Cultural Revolution have been well documented,
as have the socialist realist works created by groups of artist-workers from 1966-1976. It
was a culturally and politically unique period and has become a continuing source of
material for artists, writers, and filmmakers. The specific importance of the Cultural
Revolution's impact on the art academy system and art world in general was its
achievement of a shift away from personal agency or choice with regards to artistic
medium or subject toward a socially and politically consensual medium and subject
matter. Even prior to the onset of the Cultural Revolution, the art academies had
transformed considerably during the People's Republic Era, as evidenced byJiang Feng's
mass art activities at ZAFA in the early 1950s, accompanied by an ideological purge of
many of ZAFA's leaders in the Anti-Rightist Campaign of 1957. This purge included the
removal of ZAFA vice-president Mo Pu, a painter and Party member who was later to be
reinstated as ZAFA president from 1980-1983, a point which we will revisit in our
discussion of the Reform Era. Also, before the dramatic purges of the Anti-Rightist
Campaign, Jiang had promoted a mediatic shift towards the "international" medium of
oil painting and away from ink painting (guohua, literally "Chinese" or "domestic"
painting) because of its association with Confucian literati culture. At a 1950 conference
on reforming the medium of ink painting to better serve Yan'an directives, Jiang declared
that, "Chinese painting cannot reflect reality and will never produce large works, and so it
must be eliminated. In the future, international painting will certainly emerge. Oil
97
painting is able to reflect reality and produce large masterpieces, and it is
international."156 Despite the continued interest in woodblock prints as a revolutionary
mass art medium, it was clear from the early days of the People's Republic that Mao's
China would be visually represented in highly stylized academic socialist realist oil
painting. The most successful of these works, from an aesthetic and ideological
standpoint, were reproduced widely in publications, as posters, in calendars, and
occasionally on billboards in public spaces, but they originated as large oil paintings.
While the Anti-Rightist Campaign had many repercussions, the particular purge
of thirty-two administrators, professors, and students at ZAFA was especially severe. 157
The art academies in general, and ZAFA in particular, were vulnerable to Party
accusations of being bastions of bourgeois liberalism and hotbeds fostering objections to
governmental policy. At the same time, these academies were the primary source of the
skilled artists who were needed to create monumental works of socialist realist
propaganda art. It is not entirely surprising, then, that the academy was both a site of
revolutionary destruction and production. While formal classes ceased in 1966, the
academy grounds remained populated by professors and students throughout much of the
Cultural Revolution. During the early years of the Revolution, the campus of ZAFA, like
the campuses of many elite universities and academies, served as a concentration camp
for former professors and administrators. Students and faculty produced the desired
Socialist Realist Art as members of renamed revolutionary committees and work units,
like the Revolutionary Committee of Zhejiang Worker-Peasant-Soldier Fine Arts
156 Jiang Feng, quoted in Pan Tianshou, "Who says Chinese painting must be elminated? [Shei shuo
'honguo-hua biran bei taotai?," FineArtsResearch [Meishu Yanjiu], April 1957, in Selected Documents on 20Mcentury ChineseArt [Ershi shiji Zhongguo meishu wenxuan], vol. I, eds. Lang Shaojun and Shui Tianzhoung,
19-21 (Shanghai: Shanghai Calligraphy and Painting Publishing House, 2002; and LiI, A histoy of art in
20th-Century China, 611.
157 Zheng "Brushes are Weapons, 95.
98
Academy, the collective that includedguohua professors Wang Qingsheng and Shu
Chuanxi. Even with this collaboration, many artists were interrogated and physically
abused by radical students, sometimes to the point of death. This was the case of
sculpture professor Xiao Chuanjiu, who died at the hands of Red Guards in 1968, and
the ink painter Pan Tianshou, a former ZAFA president who was imprisoned in the
campus dining hall and publicly denounced for five years beginning in 1966 until his
death in 1971.158
While the humiliation and torture of targeted intellectuals, professors, artists, and
writers continued, there was a national return to artistic production in 1967 in
preparation for a large national exhibition in Beijing called Long Live the Victory of
Chairman Mao's Revolutionary Line.15 9 These works were variations on portraits and
history paintings, all depicting Chairman Mao. In Hangzhou, members of the Oil
Painting Department of ZAFA who had not been purged worked collectively on works
for this exhibition. As described by the painter Zheng Shengtian, a young graduate of
ZAFA who had been teaching at the academy when the Cultural Revolution began, the
components of each painting were assigned based on assumed ideological affiliations:
Two artists were assigned to [my] team: Zhou Ruiwen, a student and member of
the anti-revisionism group, and XuJunxuan, a teacher who was originally in the
conservative group but had later turned against it. Because painting was
considered a revolutionary task, it was thought that the people who had a higher
revolutionary consciousness should... [paint] the most important part of the
picture. As a young student, Zhou was given the honor of painting Mao's face.
As an "awakened intellectual," Xu was allowed to paint Mao's body. The largest
part of the painting - the sky, clouds, and entire background - was left for me, a
60
"bourgeois intellectual" who was still under some measure of surveillance.1
Xin, Pan Tianshou (Beijing: China Youth Publishing House, 1997), 356-387; and Zheng, "Brushes are
Weapons," 97-98.
159 Zheng, "Brushes are Weapons," 101.
158Lu
160 Ibid, 102.
Nq
While collaborative execution of oil painting is nothing new in the history of art, the
premise of awarding the more important segments to the more politically correct artists
was an important inversion of traditional studio ranking, consistent with the overall goals
of the Cultural Revolution. Zheng, who had been detained and imprisoned along with
older professors at the onset of the Cultural Revolution, had been released in early 1967
to work in the school cafeteria for several months before being allowed to return to his
colleagues in the oil painting department who were undergoing re-education by Red
Guards. The hierarchy of painters based on ideology was not as complete in practice as it
was in theory. In Zheng's particular example, a painting called Man's World is Mutable,
Seas Become Mulberry Fields: ChairmanMao Inspects the Situation of the Great ProletarianCultural
Revolution in Northern, South-Central, andEastern China (1967), Zheng was asked by the
younger artist Zhou Ruiwen to assist with painting Mao's face and body despite Zheng's
"bourgeois" status. 161
By 1968 ZAFA was no longer under the control of the Red Guards. Instead, a
Workers' Propaganda Team assumed leadership. These teams, deployed to colleges and
universities all over China, were made up of uneducated factory workers who were
supposed to help transform formerly bourgeois institutions. As in the assignation of
painting assignments in the oil painting studios at ZAFA, the hierarchy placed proletarian
and Communist credentials above experience or training. While under the control of the
propaganda team, the academy relocated several times in order to expose the faculty and
students to the working conditions of ordinary people outside of China's urban centers.
First they moved just outside Hangzhou in 1969. In 1970 the propaganda team moved
the academy further afield in Zhejiang province to an area near the Fuchun River and
161 Ibid,
103.
100
mountains that had coincidentally been the late-life retreat of the Song-Yuan dynasty
landscape painter and literatus Huang Gongwang (1269-1354) when he retreated from
society and devoted himself to Taoist study.16 2 After this move, the abandoned
Hangzhou campus remained shuttered until after then end of the Cultural Revolution in
1976. The Ministry of Culture announced in late 1977 that art institutions like CAFA
and ZAFA would be re-opened, and they began to admit new classes of students in 1978,
the year that Deng Xiaoping began his economic policies that would usher in the Reform
Era. It naturally took several years for the academic apparatus to rebuild, forjournals to
resume publication, and for the curricula to be redesigned and faculty reassembled.
What is important for our study of new media in the academy is that during these
early years of the Reform Era, while the nation's academic institutions were reconvening,
the Ministry of Education initiated programs to send Chinese scholars abroad for
advanced study as part of Deng's Open Door Policy. Zheng Shengtian, the "bourgeois
intellectual" oil painter who had spent final years of the Cultural Revolution recovering
from a severe illness contracted in the Fuchun mountains after the forced relocation of
ZAFA, sat for a national qualifying exam and was selected as one of the elite group to
study abroad in 1981.163 This was an extremely rare opportunity for a teacher in any
discipline, but especially fine art since most of the scholars were sent abroad to study fields
that more directly supported the "four modernizations" of industry, defense, agriculture,
and science.164 Zheng received a two-year fellowship at the University of Minnesota,
followed by a three-week tour of twelve European countries. He returned to ZAFA in
162 Ibid,
63
104.
1 Zheng Shengtian, "Preface by Zheng Shengtian," Materialsofthe Future: Documenting Chinese Contemporay
Artfiom 1980-1990, Asia Art Archive, 2011, Web video, accessed 16 March 2012,
http://www.chinal 980s.org/en/about2.aspx.
164 Futao Huang, "Transnational Higher Education: A Perspective from China," Higher EducationResearch
and Development. 22, no. 2 (2003): 193-203.
101
1983, bringing with him hundreds of photographs and slides of Western works of art as
well as books and other media that were eagerly consumed by the academy's students and
faculty, including the oil painting majors Wu Shanzhuan and Zhang Peili.
Zheng Shengtian and ZAFA in the 1980s
As much recent scholarship has documented, both CAFA and ZAFA became
centers of Chinese experimental modernism in the 1980s although by most accounts the
official curriculum was extremely restrictive, a blend of elements of Soviet and Beaux-Arts
education with no addition of late-twentieth century practices. 165 Zheng Shengtian
played an important role in augmenting the academy's studio education programs by
providing eager students and faculty with a window to Western modern and
contemporary art theory. In addition to his role at ZAFA, he was invited to present at
universities and academies all over China. At these engagements Zheng lectured on
Western art for extended periods of time, sometimes as long as five hours, to packed
rooms.166
Zheng quickly rose from his position as a professor in ZAFA's oil painting
department to the head of that department, then to an administrative position as head of
the Foreign Affairs Office. Even as an administrator, he had little power to change the
rigid curriculum based on developing technical skills and honing a realistic, imitative
style. These studio courses did not reflect the type of intellectual and artistic development
that the population of students was clamoring for, so his solution was to provide extracurricular opportunities and to populate the library with a rich collection of books and
165 Zheng , "Preface by Zheng Shengtian."
166
Ibid
102
periodicals on Western art. While he was still ajunior professor as the academy was
reconvening in 1977, Zheng played an important role in growing the academy's library
collection, which he thought would be a key resource for the crush of new students that
hoped to study art now that the academy had reopened. The library had not grown
much since he himself arrived at the academy in the 1950s, when it had a good but
limited assortment of books on Western art history, mostly dating to the early 1930s,
many of which were Lin Fengmian's personal contributions. The material was mostly on
Renaissance through nineteenth century art, with a small amount on Modern art. While
he was a student there was no way to acquire new books from outside of China, but
professors who could read English, French, or Russian would periodically translate the
foreign books already in the library's collections and publish their translations several
times a year. Many of these professors were later punished for these translations during
the Cultural Revolution.167 Aware of how his professors' translation efforts had enriched
his own academic experience, he encouraged the academy's administrators to work with
entrepreneurial booksellers who had been organizing discipline-specific book fairs around
the country in the early Reform Era. Zheng was one of three representatives from ZAFA
sent to Beijing's international bookstore to peruse catalogues of book titles, mostly from
Japan and Europe, that would be ordered for an art book fair to be held in Hangzhou
from which the academy could acquire new titles.168
167"Interview
with Zheng Shengtian, 31 October 2009, New York City," Materials ofthe Future:Documenting
Contemporary Chinese Art 1980-1990 (Asia Art Archive, 2011), Web video, accessed 16 March 2012,
http://www.chinal980s.org/en/interview-detail.aspx?interviewid=45.
16 This art book fair is legendary among Chinese students because ZAFA administrators were credited with
selling an academy-owned car in order to fmance the purchase of books for use by the students. Zheng
Shengtian asserts that the building of the ZAFA library was extremely important to the intellectual life of
the region. It was a unique resource that was used by students and faculty from universities all over the
region and nation in addition to academy affiliates. Still, he has also wanted to set the record straight that
103
In addition to developing the library as a resource, Zheng was able to leverage his
position in the academy's Foreign Affairs Office to invite visiting professors to augment
the school's course offerings. In the spring of 1985, Zheng invited the Minneapolis-based
American artist and art historian Roman Verostko (b. 1929) to lead a six-week seminar on
modem Western art.169 This course was attended not just by ZAFA students but also by
faculty from other universities and art academies that wanted to take advantage of this
rare opportunity to study with a foreign professor.17 0 Later that year Zheng also invited
the expatriate artist Zhao Wuji (Zao Wou-ki, b. 1920), a ZAFA alum who had studied
with Lin Fengmian and Pan Tianshou. Zhao had graduated in 1941 and had stayed as
an instructor in both ink and oil painting until 1947 when he left China for Paris and
established himself as a modernist painter. Even more so than with the Verostko
seminar, Zhao was on the radar of high-level officials from the academy and the Ministry
of Culture, and his presence was treated with diplomatic finesse. The opportunity to
study with Zhao was a privilege that was being awarded to professors from art academies
around the nation. When presented with his class of around twenty professors instead of
art students, Zhao expressed his disappointment to Zheng, who was able to negotiate a
compromise with the academy's president. While it was impossible to turn away the
professors who had been appointed to the course by the Ministry of Culture, it was
deemed acceptable to augment the class with students from Zheng's own painting studio,
resulting in a full room of more than thirty people total for the month-long workshop.' 7 '
the vehicle that the academy sold to contribute to the library fund was an old, non-functional truck and not
a6 car
used for personal transportation by academy officials that they sacrificed to this cause.
9
Wu Hung and Peggy Wang, eds, Contemporary ChineseArt: Primary Documents (New York: Museum of
Modem Art, 2010), 412.
170 Zheng, "Preface by Zheng Shengtian."
171 "Interview with Zheng Shengtian."
104
I believe that Zheng's advocacy to bring Roman Verostko and Zhao Wuji to
ZAFA was quite deliberate. He selected these two out of many possible professors and
working artists because they invited mediatic experimentation and a conceptual
component that he saw as lacking in the academy's curriculum. Verostko's work was
directly related to the early twentieth century modernism of artists like Mondrian,
Kandinsky, and Malevich that explored abstract forms through manipulations of shape
and color, but he was of particular interest to ZAFA because his practice involved the
mediation of painting through computer algorithms and digitally programmed machinery
as well as experimenting in purely digital art, sound, and video installations. Verostko
had begun his investigations of the possibilities presented by new media technologies in
art while a fellow at the Center for Advanced Visual Studies at MIT in 1970 in the
company of Gyorgy Kepes, and he continued to pursue computerized images when
personal computers became available in the early 1980s.1 7 2 He had only very recently
begun to use actual computer coding in his artwork when he was asked to teach in
Hangzhou. By inviting this obscure professor to lecture on Western art history, a topic
that was understood to be relevant and useful to art academy goals although less relevant
to Verostko himself, Zheng was also bringing an experimental artist to the academy.
Verostko was innovating within a modernist tradition by using leading-edge computing
technology as in his Magic Hand of Chance (1982-1985), a dynamic series of images
generated on a computer monitor as a result of a computer program that Verostko had
coded to generate "original improvisations."1 73
172 Ira Greenberg, Processing Creative Coding and ComputationalArt (Berkeley, CA- Friends of Ed,
an Apress Co,
2007), 17.
173 Roman Verostko, "Epigenetic Painting: Software As Genotype, A New Dimension of Art by Roman
Verostko Presentedat the FirstInternationalSymposium on ElectronicArt, 1988 (FISEA'88)," Roman Verostko |
105
Zheng's interest in inviting Zhao Wuji was many-fold, but I believe that the most
compelling reason was the way Zhao could bring in his person memories of the openness,
tolerance, and experimentation that had governed the art academy in the early 1930s.
This was not always ideal since Zhao, unlike Verostko, was well known in China, and
thus commanded attention from officials. 174 Like Zheng and Verostko, Zhao could
convey a sense of the Euro-American art world in his teaching, but he also served as a
bridge to the early twentieth century art practices in China. Since Zhao had missed the
imposition of socialist realism as the official style of the People's Republic and had gone
into exile during the Cultural Revolution, he was able to convey a preserved mission - to
develop Chinese modernism - from his professors Lin Fengmian and Pan Tianshou. As
seen in Zhao's works Vol d'Oiseaux (1954, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco) and August
20, 1984 (1985, University of California, San Diego), his style was abstract with remnants
of identifiable natural landscape elements. These images are rendered with a range of
brushstrokes that show the influence of his training in Chinese ink painting as well as the
sweeping gestures of Abstract Expressionism that he encountered in New York, French
informe, and the lyrical pseudo-naivet6 of Paul Klee, one of his great influences. When
reflecting on the impact of Zhao's presence at the academy, Zheng stated that it was not a
style but a profound conceptual influence felt throughout the academy.
Professors at the
academy in the Reform Era were still bound to the strict curriculum to teach imitative
techniques, and even Zheng himself, as a professor of oil painting, despite his exposure to
the multiplicity of styles and media of Western contemporary art, taught within these
Algorithmic Art Web Site, (Roman Verostko, 2011), accessed 27 March 2012,
http://www.verostko.com/epigenet.html#themeb.
74
Zhao attained a quasi-celebrity status in China due to his success as an artist living in France, and he was
able to use this status to help secure the release of his former professor Lin Fengmian in 1972. Lin had
been imprisoned since 1968 despite having issued self-criticisms and destroyed many of his own artworks.
(Sullivan, Art andArtists of Twentieth-Centuy China,153-154.)
106
parameters. Zhao was in a unique position to teach outside of these limits, both because
he himself had developed a "free heart," encouraged by Lin Fengmian, as part of his
practice in the 1930s and 1940s and because he had retained this attitude throughout the
People's Republic period when artists in China had adapted to official ideological and
mediatic impositions.
For Wu Shanzhuan and his classmates at ZAFA in 1985, the academy was not
merely a professional training school, but an environment in which they could develop a
critical lens with which to view their culture. Zheng Shengtian's work to increase the
holdings of the ZAFA library and invite guest professors to teach about art and
methodologies outside of China was essentially a realization of Dong Qichang's
prescription that artists must read and travel extensively as part of their education. Since
it was impossible for students to physically travel outside of China, Zheng shared the
knowledge he had gained while traveling abroad and augmented the straightforward
technical curriculum with the points of view of artists living and working in the West.
Even though the number of students who were able to participate in Verostko's and
Zhao's seminars was quite small, the presence of these visiting scholars on campus and
the discussion of their approaches to art was an important addition to students' general
agitation to deepen and broaden their education.
One last point about Zheng's impact on ZAFA in the mid-1980s is his defense of
the experimental turn taken by many of the oil painting students in the class of 1985.
That year's graduation exhibition featured the work of the painter GengJianyi and
Zhang Peili, who will be discussed in depth in the next chapter. 75 The academy had just
175 Although not central to this study, GengJianyi is another critically important member of the
'85 Art
New Wave who experimented in many mediums after graduating from ZAFA. A member of the Pond
107
recently implemented a policy that students need not mimic their instructors' style,
subject matter, and technique in their own work, allowing them to submit any freely
chosen style as their final project. 176 Zheng was excited to see the nontraditional
paintings presented in this show, a reflection on this new policy and the experimental
atmosphere he had helped to foster during the previous two years: "Prior to the class of
'85, all graduation projects were asked to conform to the principles of Soviet Socialist
Realism. Every student in GengJianyi's class wanted to show their individual approach
to content and form, which I encouraged."1 77 Despite the academy's invitation for
students to experiment outside traditional stylistic boundaries, the experimental work was
extremely controversial, both within the academy and in the nation's art world in general.
Zheng was summoned before ZAFA's Academic Committee to defend the students'
ideologically "incorrect" work. Images of artwork from the exhibition and the ensuing
ideological and stylistic debates were covered in the nation's foremost art publications:
Fine Arts (Meishu), the journal published by the official Chinese Artists' Association; and
Fine Arts in China (Zhongguo Meishu Bao), the journal of the Central Academy of Fine Arts in
Beijing.178 This controversy signaled that while it was possible to deviate from
straightforward artistic conventions in the Reform Era in ways that had been previously
inconceivable, it was still a marginalized minority that actually experimented. Despite
Zheng's efforts to pluralize ideological opportunities at the academy, it was an uphill
Society in the late 1980s and a dose friend of Zhang Peili, Geng also returned to ZAFA after the founding
of the New Media Art Department with Zhang as department head.
176 Gao, Total Modernity, 105.
I7? Zheng Shengtian, quoted in Karen Smith, Aine Lives: The Birth ofAvant-Garde Art in New China(Hong
Kong:
timezone 8; New York: AW Asia, 2008), 92.
178 "Zhemai biyesheng zuopin yinqi zhengyi" ("The graduation work of the Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts
caused debates"), Zhongguo meishubao, No.9, 21 (September 1985): 1;
"Biyechuangzuojiaoxue de tihui" ("The experience of graduation teaching"), Meishu, No.9, (September
1985): 43-45.
108
battle to effect change within the rigid Chinese educational system, as he was among the
minority of faculty that worked in this direction. Zheng stayed at the academy for one
more year before leaving at the end of 1986 to assume a teaching post at San Diego State
University. Zheng's final year was Wu Shanzhuan's senior year, and the next section will
explore Wu's experimentation with installation art at this time.
75% Red
In order to fully understand Wu Shanzhuan's initial experimentation with
installation, we must recontextualize his experience at the academy within the larger
framework of Reform Era China. The period of openness and experimentation at ZAFA,
encouraged by Zheng Shengtian was part of a nation-wide opening in the arts soon to be
named the '85 Art Movement 179, which emerged following official decrees and new
cultural policies put in place around 1984. These policies, concerning increased freedom
of expression, were aimed at the literary and artistic elites, a population that Deng
Xiaoping saw as necessary for China's overall economic prosperity. This policy shift
toward greater tolerance of experimentation in the arts and literature, however, was just
the latest installment in a series of post-cultural revolution cultural mandates. Deng
Xiaoping's initial 1978 economic reforms and "thought emancipation" opened China to
previously banned artifacts of Western culture, including art, literature, history,
philosophy, and film, as well as commercial goods. In the art world, this resulted in the
179 The term "'85 Art Movement", first used in early 1986, contains the politically charged term
"movement" (yundong). This name was later altered to "'85 New Wave" to avoid the use of the problematic
term and possible unnecessary attention from party officials. Since then, the terms have been used more or
less interchangeably in English-language accounts of the time, but I have chosen to use the original name in
keeping with the overtly political consciousness of the artists. Interestingly, the inaugural exhibition at
newly opened Ullens Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing was entitled "'85 New Wave - The Birth of
Chinese Contemporary Art," but the exhibition materials refer to the movement as the "'85 New Wave Art
Movement."
109
first major unofficial art exhibitions, organized by the Stars group in 1979 and 1980. In
the literary realm, a strain of post-revolutionary humanism emerged that delved into the
problematic of "socialist alienation."1 80 This first period of liberalization in the arts that
saw the public production of artwork and literature that was overtly critical of Party
policies was soon halted. Reactionary forces within the Party were displeased with the
Western ideas that had taken hold so quickly in among the nation's educated elite. The
Anti-Spiritual Pollution Movement (1982-1984) was launched by the Party against
experimental art and literature, claiming that liberalization in the cultural sphere had
caused a new bevy of social ills like crime and corruption.18 1 During this period official
exhibitions and art periodicals showed only official socialist realist artwork, reminiscent of
the singular standards upheld during the Cultural Revolution.18 2
Deng's 1984 policy shift courting the elite intellectual population opened with the
removal of the Cultural Revolution-era officials who had launched the Anti-Spiritual
Pollution campaign. It was met with understandable skepticism on the part of many
avant-garde artists who left behind the threads of optimistic humanism that had
characterized their work in the late 1970s, and only cautiously approached this new
opening. Nonetheless, many artists welcomed the shift, and Deng's policies were
matched with new calls for innovation and individualization in the arts by senior artworld figures, many of whom were leaders of artists' organizations in China's extensive
arts bureaucracy. New arts periodicals emerged; old ones, including official publications,
underwent editorial changes, publishing articles on the importance of artistic freedom
I80 Wang, High CultureFever, 12.
Christopher Hudson, The China Handbook: Regional handbooks of economic development: prospects onto the 21st
century
(Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn Publishers, 1997), 304.
182 Andrews, "Fragmented Memory," 8.
181
110
and openness to the outside world. These periodicals also promoted new art by young
artists that presented a clear challenge to the status quo. 183 Wu and his colleagues at
ZAFA were among the young artists who were featured in this new breed of art journal,
which published images and exhibition reviews of student artwork as well as emerging
artists' own writings, musings, and manifestos.
These periodicals sometimes profiled individual artists, but more often they
chronicled the numerous unofficial (and often informal) artistic groups that had sprung up
all over China and put them in touch with each other in a way that previous generations
had never been. At a 1986 conference in Zhuhai, Guangdong province, geared toward
taking stock of the previous year's artistic activity, Gao Minglu (a 1981 graduate of the
Tianjin Academy of Fine Art who had gone on to pursue an MA in Chinese Art History
at the China Arts Research Academy in Beijing) declared that the art of the '85 New
Wave was defined as: spontaneous and self-organized, group-oriented, rebellious,
experimental, and influenced by Western modernist forms. 8 4 The "group-oriented"
nature of the work is not surprising considering most of the artists involved were current
or recent students at China's many art academies, who, like many students in other
disciplines at the time, had taken their education into their own hands, constantly
discussing and debating the ideas in the newly-available flood of Western history,
philosophy, and art books amongst their peers. Also, as artists' individual rights were not
guaranteed even in an era of relaxed government intervention, group exhibitions were
politically safer, decreasing the chances that any one artist would be singled out. In Wu's
case, there are additional layers to his group-oriented approach. Cultural Revolution
83
1 Ibid,
84
1 IbiL
9.
10.
III
references that color his early installation work highlight his interest in unpacking the
social history of that era, including its collaborative and anonymous artwork and the
chaotic, palimpsestic visual environments that colored most public spaces at that time. In
addition, his collaborations related to his internalization of Popperian logic and
philosophy that, once created, objects exist in and of themselves, and are not the
intellectual property of any individual.
Wu Shanzhuan and his colleagues HuangJian, Lu Haizhou, Luo Xianyue, Ni
Haifeng, Song Chenghua and Zhang Haizhou from ZAFA formed one of these loose
collectives, and together they executed two "self-organized... [and] rebellious"
installations in Zhoushan, Wu's home island off the Zhejiang coast, slightly removed from
the provincial capital of Hangzhou. The collective's installations, both entitled 75% Red,
20% White, 5% Black, were held as private exhibitions in 1985 and 1986, the first in an
unused Buddhist temple and the second at the Institute of Mass Culture, a public
organization in Wu's hometown of Zhoushan where he taught basic art classes to local
fisherman and their children.185
In the first collective installation environment entitled 75% Red, 20% White, 5%
Black (1985), the components of painted wood and canvas are more or less in the realm of
the two-dimensional, but the use of the space is complicated by the addition of large
circular medallions on the floor of the space, some flush with the floor and some slightly
raised off the ground. Large red painted canvases bearing images of bold, black Chinese
characters of various sizes and the yin-yang symbol in black and white are propped up
against the walls of the space, a large room originally used as the Buddhist temple's
185 "Wu Shanzhuan: Interview by South ChinaMorning PostjournalistJoyce Lau," (Hong Kong: Asia Art
Archive, 2003), unpublished DVD.
112
assembly hall. The installation is by no means seamless, and the parts of the wall not
covered by these propped canvases are left untreated. The medallions on the floor (also
untreated) are wooden circles painted red with inscribed black triangles and squares,
some with black or white characters written on them. They are arranged to form a yinyang, a circle with inscribed interlocking commas, a shape found in Daoist and Buddhist
visual culture representative of universal balance.
The largest character visible in the documentary photograph of this installation,
the visible half of a two-character phrase that is truncated in this image, is shen ($), a
character used to mean "god," "spirit," "soul" or sometimes "God." The painting visible
in the upper left corner of the photograph, a yin-yang surrounded by eight characters in
white circles, reminiscent of the ba gua (literally "eight areas"), a map of elemental forces
used in Daoist visual cosmology, usually represented with a series of trigrams. Although
the one available installation photograph does not present a clear picture of all of the
paintings and the textual messages imbedded in them, it is clear that the group's
installation is making use of a pseudo-religious semiotics, invoking the exhibition space's
previous incarnation as a sacred space but overlaying the official-looking color scheme
and typography of the Cultural Revolution. These Daoist, Buddhist, and CulturalRevolution-era Communist references are all squarely Chinese. But, they are all merged
and conflated in this space that has been rededicated to Reform-era unofficial
contemporary art, highlighting an important recurring trope in Wu Shanzhuan's
individual work pursued after this initial collective experimentation: the cultural, textual,
ideological, and visual legacies of the socio-political world are all equally present and
equally nonsensical.
11.3
The second incarnation of the 75% Red installation (1986) took place in a more
formalized space, hermetically sealed from the outside world, which begins to evoke the
interiority we will see in Wu's own installation work. The room, which we are told is
6x10x4 meters, is a large but not cavernous space, covered entirely with the three
signature colors. The floor and ceiling are covered in red, and the walls are plastered
from top to bottom in paper painted with red, black, and white symbols and large,
fractured, or sideways characters. The back wall is covered with a centered composition
dominated by the orthogonal lines of a slightly phallic arrangement of black squares,
where the center square isjust slightly larger than the symmetrical pair on either side.
These side squares are inscribed each with a large red circle, each of which is inscribed
with a small white square whose sides are parallel to the lines of the larger black square
and the room. This simple arrangement of basic geometric forms invokes the shape of
traditional Chinese coins. In the large, central, black square, the artists have inscribed a
smaller white square onto which they have painted some of the basic strokes used to write
Chinese characters. The black outer strokes, which resemble an "L" and an upside-down,
backwards "L", come together to form another square shape, and the central red stroke
(pie, ) ) slopes from upper right to a tapered point at the bottom left. Instead of forming
a readable character, the outer strokes create a frame for the pie, which, isolated from any
readable meaning, becomes an abstract form.
Despite the civic secularity of its location, the entire central composition again
mimics aspects of Buddhist iconography. Here, the resemblance is to the central altar
found in most Buddhist temples: the main Buddha sculpture sits on a pedestal flanked on
each side by two identical sculptural elements, usually Bodhisattvas or pagodas. The
114
centrality and elevation of the pie form in place of the Buddha speaks to the overall
disruption of visual expectations in this space. The characters in the installation confound
legibility - they are not readable words. Instead, they are fractured, reoriented, and
presented as graphic manipulations of lines rather than bearers of meaning. Despite
being in a three dimensional space, the installation remains squarely in the realm of the
two dimensional and the visual, and the materials are limited to poster color and ink on
paper, the components of the genres of painting, drawing and printmaking.
The question then arises as to whether these are simply exhibitions that have been
installed in a particular way, or whether they actively engage the medium of installation
art as it was then emerging in Western art, a genre that these artists were certainly
knowledgeable about thanks to the materials available through ZAFA. That is, is this
mediatic exploration a conscious attempt to levy a critique at the static, Party-sanctioned
art world, similar to the manner in which Western artists explored installation art as an
implicit critique of the art market and a way to problematize questions of genre, medium,
and concept? I believe that the group's refusal to utilize their technical skills as Socialist
Realist painters is indeed an admonitory gesture and a critique of the elite art education
they had received. With this refusal to employ academic painting techniques, the 75%
Red installations also owe a debt to Dada, Constructivism, and other early European
Modernist explorations of form, color, and space. These were all important steps away
from academic conventions, but the truly critical device employed by these artists was the
exploration of Chinese characters and their forms in this modernist visual vocabulary.
This move to re-incorporate the Chinese written language, or at least a suggestion
of the written word, into fine art works on several levels. Not only had the Communist
Party altered Chinese written language by introducing increasing numbers of simplified
115
characters in the late 1950s and early 1960s, but the Cultural Revolution had made
constant public use of written language as a means of censure and control: on posters,
shame boards, and banners. The 75% Red artists were working in the aftermath of this
loaded past; their laboratorial deconstruction of characters into illegible component
shapes is a means by which they pull these characters out of the world of politics and into
a space of aesthetic contemplation. At the same time, this allows these contemporary
artists to re-inhabit the role of traditional Chinese literati and their text-heavy artistic
practice relying on a firm understanding of painting, poetry, and politics. In addition to
this general history of literati art that fused calligraphy, painting, and couched messages
of dissent and admonition, one specific practice that merits mention in this study is spirit
writing - the Daoist practice of automatic writing either in sand or on paper. In this
practice, the writer-participants are the mediums through which the spirits convey their
messages in textual form. This practice of ostensibly channeling moral messages from
the spirit world was adopted by many late Qing literati and was continued into the
twentieth century and the Republican era as a group activity practiced all over China. In
this incarnation, practitioners pluralized the supposed spirit sources to include Buddhist
deities, Confucius and many of his deceased followers, Jesus, Mohammed, and
occasionally political or literary personalities.186 This practice became a generalized
spiritual exercise, practiced both by secular groups like the Society for Awakening to
Goodness (founded in 1919 in Beijing) and in Buddhist temples like the one that was
repurposed in Zhoushan.187 Spirit writing is important when considering the operations
Vincent Goossaert, and David A. Palmer, The Religious Question in Modern China (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2011), 97; James Miller, Chinese Religions in Contemporay Societies (Santa Barbara, Calif: ABCCLIO,
2006), 135.
87
186
1
Ibid
116
that Wu and the 75% Red artists perform on language as it was a means of both
expressing moral and often admonitory messages while simultaneously avoiding agency
and invoking the authority of deities or important deceased historical figures. The 75%
Red works similarly invoke the authority of Official text and religious symbols and avoid
attribution by hiding inside collective authorship and a standardized style.
While the 75% Red artists were not explicit regarding modem Chinese artistic
practices, we are given a clue in Wu's writings that touch on Chinese written language
and its unique position in linguistic and aesthetic realms. This piece on the group work
75% Red, 20% White, 5% Black was published in a 1987 issue of Meisku Sichao (Art Trends),
ajournal published in Wuhan by the Hubei provincial branch of the Chinese Artists'
Association that was shut down later that year for its controversial articles by young artists
and critics:
... The aim [of our group] is to view Chinese typography and the unique
phenomenon of the Chinese written word within the world linguistic
family from the perspective of aesthetic beauty...
If we are [creating] conceptual art, it is based on the concept that the
aesthetic forms of Chinese typography in themselves exist as works of art;
rather than on the concept of Chinese characters as linguistic
expressions. In this way our conceptual art differs from Western
conceptual 'World Art,' which emphasizes the concepts expressed by
language.
Finally, I ground our painting on this foundation - that it is a form of
'new' pure art that extends artistic language. Artistic language always
plays a crucial role in the fate of art history, and as such the value of the
artist lies in his creation and discovery of an artistic language (that's why
Kandinsky and Duchamp have been so inspirational to us).
Given this, I think the crucial reason for the humorous effect of our work
on the audience is as follows: when we realize Chinese characters as
forms of pure beauty on the canvas, the audience still recognizes them as
a language that expresses a concept; in other words, the humor lies in the
fact that these pure forms of 'Chinese characters' constitute at the same
time a kind of language that expresses meaning, but it is a language that
does not correspond to the established codes of meaning for Chinese
characters.
117
As for color, red is for our memories... people have viewed the past
through aesthetic eyes ... the Cultural Revolution was an extremist
movement, it utilized the color red more than any other movement in
human history... 75% Red, 20% Black, 5% White is only a slogan, a
framework through which people can view the display.
-Wu Shanzhuan, "On Our Painting," in Meishu Sichao (Art Trends), 1987, issue 1188
The language of this treatise is remarkably specific. He briefly, noncommittally, uses the
term "conceptual art" at the beginning of the passage to frame their explorations of
typographic forms, but then subsequently refers to their work as "painting," instead of the
more general term "art." In the concluding paragraph of the above quote, he refers to
the work as a "display," but at no point does he refer to it as "installation." This does not
mean that the medium of installation was insignificant to Wu and his collaborators, but it
does imply that this genre is perhaps just one facet of their overall project, a means by
which they could visually manifest their conceptual program and disengage from the
world at large.
The experience that the 75% Red artists created with their installation can only be
imagined, but photographs suggest panoramic vision and graphic experimentation rather
than corporeal manipulation. Examining Ilya Kabakov's (b. 1933) contemporaneous
writing describing his use of the medium of installation to create a "total installation," we
see his goal was one of total sensory and psychological engulfment. In his words, "the
main motor of the total installation... [is] the cranking up of the wheel of associations,
cultural or everyday analogies, personal memories." 18 9 Kabakov harnesses these types of
associations by employing actual found objects and composing his installations with an
188 Wu Shanzhuan and Inga Svala Thorsdottir, Wu Shanzhuan: Red Humour International(Hong Kong: Asia
Art Archive, 2005), Insert, Artists' Writings 07.
189 Ilya Kabakov (1992) from Ilya Kabakov, "On the "Total Installation" (Ostfildern: Cantz, 1995), quoted in
Claire Bishop, InstallationArt: a criticalhistoiy (New York: Routledge, 2005), 16.
18
element of theatricality, and creating an experiential narrative, as in The Man Who Flew
Into Spacefrom His Apartment (1981-1988). In comparison, the 75% Red installations work
in the opposite manner. The artists have transformed familiar spaces by ridding them of
their recognizable objects, and have installed paintings that render otherwise familiar,
readable signs into mute graphic forms. This alien environment could also be seen as a
"total installation," but the result is not one of layered personal and cultural references,
but of a stark, unrecognizable visual milieu.
While the 75% Red artists might not have been aware of Kabakov's work
specifically, they were certainly aware of the practice of creating installations using found
objects and the shift away from aesthetically isolated art installations to those which
shared a common vocabulary with quotidian environments. Their choice to ignore that
trajectory implies that the medium of installation as it had lately evolved in the the Soviet
and Western contexts was not of primary concern when compared with their individual
project of artistic exploration and experimentation, which is still remarkably grounded in
their identity as painters, albeit in poster paint rather than oil. This is no surprise given
the rigorous program in painting that they had all followed at ZAFA. Even though this
program had been augmented by Zheng Shengtian's additional educational resources
that invited new and different artistic approaches, they were still so fluent in the language
of two-dimensional artistic creation that their mediatic experimentations began there. In
the next section, I will explore Wu's iconic early installation work Red Humor, examining
the ways in which this solo exploration of the medium of installation goes further toward
an inhabitation of traditional literati practices of subtle dissent and criticism within an
absurd Modernist visual discourse.
119
Red Humor
Installation art it a genre that exists at the borders and intersections of architecture,
sculpture, and two-dimensional representation, all of which are academic subjects, with
the latter two categories major courses of study in China's art academies. In Wu
Shanzhuan's case, the practice of installation has allowed him to materialize a larger
conceptual project while flexing the academic artistic vocabulary that he learned at ZAFA.
As with the 75% works, Red Humor (1986) relies upon the conceptual fungibility of
painting and the written word as used by traditional literati. In so doing, he is able to
present a series of subtle and high-reaching critiques cached inside a seemingly
nonsensical and naive amalgamation of colors and words.
In 1986, simultaneous to his collaborations on the 75% Red, 20% Black 5% Wlite
series (also the year of his graduation from ZAFA), Wu began working on his installation
Red Humor in his Zhoushan studio. This installation was later offered at a more public
venue - the Zhejiang Museum in Hangzhou - also in 1986. This piece gained
international notoriety with its inclusion in the 1998 exhibition curated by the '85 Art
New Wave's primary promoter Gao Minglu - Inside Out: New Chinese Art. This exhibition
was held in New York (exhibited at PS 1 and the Asia Society) and San Francisco (SF
MoMA). The photographs documenting the successive iterations of Red Humor are
indistinguishable, implying that despite its chaotic appearance, the piece is composed of a
set of modularized panels that are easily reassembled as long as the venue can
accommodate the original dimensions of the work rather than being reinstalled as a sitespecific work. The piece is composed of a room plastered on each face with text
fragments from a variety of sources, some in quick, messy handwriting, some in the
simple, thick, boldface type associated with the authority of political announcements and
120
slogans handed down by the Central committee. The color scheme is red, white, and
black, with red dominating the other two, although at no point are the viewers presented
with the type of clean, purely red surface they would have found in the second installation
of 75% Red, 20% Black 5% White (1986).
The jumble of words and phrases contribute to the overall illegibility of Red Humor.
In addition to pieces of paper bearing text being pasted over and cutting off other texts,
some words are blacked out, smudged, crossed out, splattered with paint, and otherwise
visually compromised. Wu adds unexplained circles, X's and arrows to the mix, as if
connecting the messages with some larger narrative, although ultimately there is none.
Some of the banners are installed upside down or sideways. Even the four large
characters on the floor, seemingly clear and authoritative, are surprisingly hard to read,
alternatively interpreted as "wu shuo ba dao" ("talking rubbish") and "wu ren shuo dao" ("no
one can interpret it"). While these are not wildly divergent in meaning or connotation, it
is interesting to note this in light of other purposefully unreadable characters being used
during this period by Wu and other '85 Movement artists. The visual ambiguity of the
characters (specifically the bottom left character, which has been interpreted as both
(ren) and
A (ba)), is related to Wu's concurrent work on "nonsense"
A
characters, another
part of his Red Humor series. These works relate to the 1977 "resimplification" of Chinese
written language under the ultraconservative Chairman Hua Guofeng who tried to
continue the legacy of Mao and the Cultural Revolution with his own brand of
revolutionary policies. In an attempt to make literacy more prevalent by reducing the
already simplified characters even further, characters became virtually unreadable, as
they were simplified to the point where similar characters could not be distinguished one
121
from the other. The program was completely abandoned after a few years. Wu, however,
was able to take from this process a keen interest in the form of characters as separated
from their meaning.
The other legible texts in Red Humor are unrelated and wildly varying in content,
including Buddhist sutras, commercial tag lines, Cultural Revolution-era and
contemporary political slogans,jokes, and lines from medical texts.190 Two of the clearest
pieces of text are on the right wall. The first, pasted sideways, reads "zui hou de wan can"
("the last supper"), an important religious event in the Christian tradition and an iconic
painting in the Western art history canon, a phrase that looks bizarrely incongruous in
blocky, bold red typeface. The next, just above it looks as if it were quickly written by
hand, reading "Lao Wang: Wo huijia le,"("Mr. Wang: I went home").
This nonlinear, non-narrative onslaught of words, presented in an all-over
composition presents an interesting re-presentation of visual elements that might almost
be ready-mades from the mundane world, but upon closer inspection are a coherent
series of Wu's flat works. Rather than redefining the physical space of a standard room
and the viewer's place in relationship to that space, his machinations are in the realm of
the two-dimensional and the visual. With his exclusive use of the flat surfaces of the walls,
ceiling, and floor, Wu has kept his work grounded in the realm of two-dimensional
composition, but his use of text and simple linear symbols destabilizes his relationship to
painting and other pictorial arts. The pictorial, however, is restored by the way in which
the overloading of textual elements gives way to a visual jumble of red, black and white
lines, a coherent incoherence colored by the visual vernacular of the late 20h century
190 Norman Bryson, "The Post-Ideological Avant-Garde," in Inside/Out:New Chinese Art, ed. Gao Minglu
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 55.
122
Chinese written word. By mixing authoritative slogans and casual correspondence, he
conflates the worlds of graphic design, printjournalism, official banners, and sloppy
handwriting of different scales. The information that might be conveyed by these
messages gives way to an overall composition of red, white, and black.
The current of admonition in this work is strong, as Red Humor is essentially an
interiorization of Cultural Revolution era public visual culture and its inhumane
treatment of many innocent people. Wu's extensive layering of posters and the use of
hand-written signs in red, white, and black strongly evokes the walls covered by Red
Guards with big character posters (da 7i bao, k!PfL). These walls of posters, emblematic
of the type of adolescent zeal that made the Cultural Revolution possible, were
continuously in flux as students hastily wrote and pasted up new revolutionary slogans
and counter-revolutionary denunciations. In this sense, Wu is simply employing the
visual vocabulary of his youth, bringing this unruly, spontaneous visual culture into a
space of artistic consumption. The installation, however, is by no means a ready-made or
a mere act of curation, as he has taken the practice into the present day. Wu created the
posters himself, including words and phrases from different points in Chinese history, and
installing them sideways and upside down, implicitly critiquing the logic of radical politics
by exchanging political messages for inconsistent and diverse soundbites. He has also
created a space that lacks the chaos of the street-level political orations of the Cultural
Revolution. By creating a five-sided room with posters covering all five sides, he has
created a new type of privatized space, a hermetic cave meant for a limited audience as
opposed to an open urban environment. This is perhaps the most profound act of
admonition, by removing the posters and walls from the context of zealous Cultural
123
Revolution cacophony he reveals the inherent absurdity and immorality of the Red
Guards and their political ringleaders. Wu has spoken in a very limited fashion about his
own experience as a sent-down student who learned to farm during the Cultural
Revolution, and how his father was "not treated too good." 19 1 It is certain that he was
aware of the legacy of the Cultural Revolution as it pertained to ZAFA and many of his
professors who had been rehabilitated in the Reform Era, and that this work reflects his
profound disapproval.
In the piece published in Meishu Sichao concerning the 75% Red series, Wu has
given a few clues as to his historical influences when he mentions "inspiration" drawn
from Wassily Kandinsky and Marcel Duchamp because of their "creation and discovery"
of an "artistic language" (my emphasis). The inspiration taken from these seminal artists in
the Western Modern canon is no doubt related to their importance at watershed
moments in the aesthetic and artistic history of their cultures: Kandinsky evolved from a
painter of Impressionist-influenced landscapes to one of pure abstraction, and Duchamp
introduced the revolutionary practice of employing ready-made objects as stand-alone
sculpture. Wu's practice to develop his own artistic vernacular that would be equally
radical in his own specific cultural context, a self-conscious watershed moment already
branded as an intellectual and artistic movement.
It is the less visible influence of classical Chinese art that helps situate Wu's
installation works as a new iteration on the theme of admonition. First, we must take into
account that the foundations of the Chinese art academy system in the early twentieth
century were based on creating an atmosphere in which Chinese and Western art might
be appropriately synthesized to best represent modern China. Lin Fengmian's goals to
191"Wu Shanzhuan: Interview."
124
do so were rooted in his own access to works of Classical Chinese art in European
museum collections that he saw for the first time while studying abroad.19 2 In the Reform
Era, the curricula and library provided students with ample access to classical Chinese art
and theory as a matter of course. The impact of this information, however, was
conceptual rather than stylistic, not unlike Zheng Shengtian's assessment of the influence
of Zhao Wuji's seminar. The fact that it existed at all was downplayed in the face of the
overwhelming affinity that ZAFA artists had for modem and contemporary Western art
and literature.
Wu's subtle application of traditional literati moralizing in his work is so oblique
that many of his colleagues have failed to grasp it, asserting that his work is completely
Western.193 Hints that he views himself as a cultural critic in the lineage of traditional
Confucian scholars have surfaced in many of Wu's reflections upon his reputation among
his colleagues who have described his oeuvre as completely Western, a label that he sees
as concerned with form rather than meaning.194 I believe that his focus on Chinese
characters and language in his installations speaks directly to his self-identification as an
observer of Chinese culture and society. It is the application of his elite status as an
educated member of the intellectual class that he uses to engage the written word. He
simultaneously obfuscates this classical, scholarly role by overlaying a pseudo-scientific
vocabulary to describe the visual impact of characters as graphic forms. In Wu's
obfuscating words:
Whether we are speaking of the function of the written word in forming the
cognitive methods of a people, or the impact of the written word in shaping the
psychology of a people, from either perspective the Chinese language presents an
192 Lindyjoubert, Educating in the Arts: The Asian Experience, Twenty-Four Essays (Educationin the Asia-Pacific
Region: Issues, Concerns and Prospects, Vol 11) (Dordrecht, NL: Springer-Verlag Netherlands, 2007), 41.
193 "Wu Shanzhuan: Interview."
194Ibid
125
exceptional paradigm.... Its strictly mono-syllabic phonetic system and the
unique physical structure of the Chinese logographic form combine to strongly
isolate the Chinese language within the world family of languages. If a written
language is the key to unlocking the soul of a people, then losing the "key" of
Chinese characters is tantamount to locking the soul of a powerful people inside a
vault.... Essentially, the Chinese character is an "expressive" word; on a purely
visual level, however, it is a word whose physical composition is formulated
according to a strict structural system. Within the confines of the square-word
format, the basic strokes conjure forth 49,000 magical structures (the number of
characters in the Kangxi dictionary). Just on this point alone, we can say that the
Chinese people have created 49,000 forms of beauty.1 95
He presents himself as an insider and an outsider, an amateur linguist and social
philosopher, all the while skirting the classical Chinese artistic practices that combine
painting, poetry and politics in a manner that is conceptually similar to his own art.
The most stable example of Wu's use of the written word in Red Humor (Hongse
Toumo, J iMAA) is the title itself, which merits discussion as a fundamental component
of this installation work. The color red has multiple connotations in China most notably
as the traditional color of celebration and prosperity and the color associated with the
international socialist and communist movements and the Chinese Communist Party and
army. During the Cultural Revolution, this color term became especially labored, as it
was used constantly to label people, concepts, and institutions as politically "correct" as
opposed to the "incorrect" or bourgeois connotation that would result in the label of
black. Also worth considering is the legacy of the color red in the history of modern art,
specifically the formal experiments with basic shapes and colors by the Russian
Supremetist Kazimir Malevich (1879-1935), and the multiple connotations of the title his
1925 painting Red Square. In this title, Malevich simultaneously referred to the public
square in Moscow of the same name, the double entendre of "red" signifying "beautiful"
in Russian, and Russian revolutionary communist politics. The subtitle for this work is
195 Wu Shanzhuan, "On Chinese," in Meishu, 1985, issue 8, reprinted in Wu and Thorsdottir, Wu
Shanzhuan: Red Humour International,Artists' Writings 03.
126
PainterlyRealism, Peasant Woman in Two Dimensions, a reference to the art historical genre of
portraiture the the artist's role of mediation, overlaid onto the non-objective
monochromatic abstract composition.196 Wu was familiar with the abstract painting of
Malevich, and the formal similarities between the 75% Red... works' use of twodimensional paintings and Malevich's 1915 Last Exhibtion ofFuturistPaintings0,10 are an
interesting comparison. In ... 0,10, Malevich collaborated with Vladimir Tatlin and Ivan
Puni, and the group performed a similar operation to the 75% Red... artists by playing
with cultural-religious conventions and making strange an otherwise familiar setting. In
the case of the 0,10 the documentary photograph of Malevich's works reveals abstract
paintings composed of monochromatic geometric shapes on two walls, with a black
square painting occupying the room's upper corner - the traditional place reserved for
the display of religious icons. 197
The second component of Wu Shanzhuan's tide, humor, provides another
window into the admonitory nature of his work and artistic mission. Historically, the
term humor,youmo (A
), appeared in China in the 1930s as part of a literary movement
and cultural trend connected with China's modernization and encounter with Western
conceptions of humor, a distinct concept from the traditional Chinese huaji (?AV) which
corresponds more to "amusing" or "laughable" in English. 198 The key figure in the
cultural fascination with humor was the essayist Lin Yutang and his circle that published
196Rainer Crone, Kazimir Severinovich Malevich, and David Moos, Kazimir Malevich. The Climax ofDisclosure
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 119.
197 John C. Welchman, Invisible Colors:A Visual History of Titles (New Haven, Conn: Yale University Press,
1997), 171.
198 Jocelyn Valerie Chey andJessica Milner Davis, eds., Humour in Chinese Life and Letters: Classicaland
TraditionalApproaches (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2011), 3; Qian Suoqiao, "Discovering
Humour in Modem China: the launching of the Analects FortnightlyJournal and the 'Year of Humour,'
(1933)" in ibid, 191.
127
Analects Fortnighty (Lunyu Banyuekan, ifi
- )]1'j), ajournal featuring humorous, tongue-
in-cheek, and satirical writings, beginning in 1932.199 That the group chose the name of
the Confucian classic on moral and political philosophy was both a playful gesture and a
connection to their editorial program of publishing examples of humor written by premodem figures like Confucius, the Tang poet Li Bai, and the Qing general Zeng Guofan
(1811-1872) alongside contemporary cultural commentators. 200 Wu Shanzhuan adopted
this conceptual collage technique employed in Analects Fortnighty and similar satirical
literary journals of Republican Era in his work Red Humor, but he also employs the huaji
tradition with direct linkage to Confucian literati. This tradition is moderated by
Confucian dictates on propriety, that humor, or perhaps more precisely "amusing
delight" should be: moderate, private, tasteful, useful, and benign. 20' With these
descriptors as a guide, it becomes dear that Wu's Red Humor employs humor in this
Confucian, constructive manner - applying censure without naming individuals or
rehashing appalling violence. Perhaps most importantly, the Confucian idiom is evident
in the practice of his work in a "benign" realm of art, slightly apart from the real political
movements that were gaining traction around him that would come to a head in the
violent crackdown of student demonstrators in Tiananmen Square in 1989.
199 Charles A. Laughlin, The Literature ofLeisure and Chinese Modernig (Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press,
106.
2008),
2 00
Ibi i, 40.
201 Xu, Weihe, "The Classical Confucian Concepts of Human Emotion and Proper Humour," in Chey,
Jocelyn Valerie, andJessica Milner Davis. Humourin ChineseLife andLetters: Classicaland TraditionalApproaches.
Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2011, p. 4 9 .
128
Installation and the novelty of new media
Wu's specific uptake of installation art in the 1980s presents an important
continuation of traditional Chinese critical art practices rather than a haphazard
adoption of a Western contemporary art medium. This mediatic break with his academic
training is particularly important given the legacy of strict cultural policy and ideological
pressure to work in specific mediums, styles, and genres from the 1940s onward. Wu was
not alone in developing a non-academic artistic practice during the Reform Era, but it is
important to understand that the groups of artists concerned with this type of art practice
were all educated in traditional art academies with rigid curricula. At the academy in
Hangzhou, Zheng Shengtian helped to foster conditions that might encourage students to
develop their own practice outside the prescribed norms. He helped to grow the
academy's library, which became a broad and deep resource for Western and Chinese art
history, and invited in guest professors who, like himself, could share knowledge of the
Euro-American art world along with their own art practices that extended far beyond the
limits of the academy's curriculum. In making these subtle but meaningful additions to
the educational environment at the academy, Zheng was making bold connections to
China's pre-Communist past. His importation of these foreign resources was both and
act of connecting to the mission of the academy as founded by Lin Fengmian and Cai
Yuanpei during the Republic of China era and a way of engaging with a variation of the
classical Chinese literati-artist's education based on extensive reading and travel (albeit
travel by proxy). The liberal educational environment fostered by Lin and Cai in the
early twentieth century had drawn criticism almost immediately from important cultural
players like Lu Xun and the many artists that carried out his leftist artistic vision.
Moreover, Lin and Cai had been outright condemned by official arts leaders in the era of
129
Mao Zedong. Mao's cultural policies as articulated at Yan'an were made more explicit
during the Cultural Revolution, to the exclusion and condemnation of Cai and Lin.
Zheng's reconnection with Lin's pedagogy based on experimentation and individual
artistic development was not completely isolated given the other liberalizing initiatives in
academia that gained traction during the Reform Era, but it was contested and
questioned by the representatives of leftist orthodoxy that still made up the majority of
Chinese administrative bodies in the 1980s. Efforts to incorporate more Western-leaning
cultural policies were regarded with an amount of suspicion but also deemed necessary as
part of the overall national project of opening up and modernizing. Efforts to connect to
China's Confucian past in an effort to more precisely engage Chinese cultural issues were
even more fraught, both for officials and for the generally Modernist and Europhilic
artists themselves. This is obvious in the lack of classical Chinese references in Wu's
plentiful writings published on his early installation works. The re-positioning of a latetwentieth century textual visual environment into the world of art in a work like Red
Humor, however, begs a closer analysis with respect to the traditional Chinese scholarartist and his fusion of poetry, painting, and political criticism couched in the language of
earnest naivete.
These examples of Wu's experimentation with the new medium of installation
were in many ways chronicles of a developing practice at the intersections of twodimensional art and three-dimensional space. In the next chapter, I will explore the
implications of a different kind of "new" medium: video. Video art was a completely
different visual tangent. The medium's distinct technological bearing and the fairly brief,
direct genealogy that connects it to Fluxus practices of the 1960s make it's adoption in
China somewhat more consistent with video art practices in the West. China's extremely
130
limited history of television broadcasting, a state-controlled enterprise from its inception,
complicates this narrative, and the negotiation of the medium of television as a device for
societal and governmental critique was an important background for Zhang Peili's early
experimentation with video as a fine art medium. These mediatic negotiations played out
alongside the feverish cultural developments in other mass media during the Reform Era.
With this in mind, one can begin to situate the exceptional critical tools that Zhang and
Wu developed at ZAFA within the context of more mainstream Chinese cultural history
and the persistent Confucian critical practices that manifested throughout the intellectual
realm of the 1980s.
131
Chapter 4
Cultural Fevers in the Reform Era, New Media Broadcasting,
and Zhang Peili's Video Art
We must take steps to accelerate the development of modern media of education, includingradio and
television. Broadcastingoffers an important means of developing education with greaterfaster,better, and
more economical results, and we should takefull advantage of it 202
-Deng Xiaoping, speech at the National Conference on Education, 1978
Right now in China's intellectual and cultural circles there is a tide of interest in discussing culture.
Participatingin this discussion are the oldergeneration of scholars as well as middle-aged experts. What
is especially stimulatingis that many promisingyoung scholars have entered this discussion. They are all
pondering the problems raised by modernization. Their thoughts all concentrate on one poin4 namely: can
China's ancient culture in modern times bringforth a new spring? Do we dare to respond to the challenge
offered us by modern Western culture? Culture calls out to philosophy, andphilosophy hasfallen in love
with culture. The philosophy of culture is becoming afield that attractspeople's attention. 203
-Bao Zunxin, Introduction to the Philosophy of Culture book series, 1986
A Chinese proverb says xian zhan, hou zou:first "execute" then "report" [to the emperor]. It seems to
me this was ratherback tofront. Surety protocol is tofirst come up with a report and announceyour
intention to execute an action. 204
-Zhang Peili, on About X? Exhibition Procedures, 1987
The three above quotes frame this chapter's discussion of new media art,
specifically Zhang Peili's 30x30, and its place in the intellectual and educational sphere of
the Reform Era. Deng Xiaoping addressed the National Conference on Education in
April 1978, the very dawn of the Reform Era, stating that the nation's priority should be
to improve the quality of education, raise teaching standards, and draw from the
strengths of the intellectual classes who had suffered unnecessarily at the hands the Gang
Deng Xiaoping, Selected Works ofDeng Xiaoping, 1975-1982 (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1984), 124.
Bao Zunxin, introduction to Xie Xuanjun, Myths and NationalSpirit (Shenhuayu minzujingshen), Philosophy
of Culture Book Series (Wenhua zhexue congshu) (Shandong Arts and Literature Press (Shandong wenyi
chubanshe), 1986), quoted in Su Xiaokang, "Arousing the Whole Nation to Self-Questioning - a Few
Words on the Design of the Television Series Deathsong of the River," in Deathsong of the River: A Reader's Guide to
the Chinese TVSeries Heshang, by Su Xiaokang, Luxiang Wang, Richard W. Bodman, and Pin P. Wan.
(Ithaca, N.Y.: East Asia Program, Cornell University, 1991), 94.
2 04
Zhang Peili (1987), quoted in Smith, Mine Lives, 396.
202
203
132
of Four during the Cultural Revolution. These educated classes were not "bourgeois
intellectuals" and had by and large committed to a socialist agenda and could be
considered both "red and expert."
05
He went on to discuss specific methods of
improving the nation's educational programs, and highlighted nascent broadcasting
technologies as a way of achieving "greater, faster, better, and more economical results."
The identification of a future that would make use of "new", or at least previously
underutilized, media was important for the Reform Era in general and for the education
sector in particular. While Deng sought a rapprochement with the intellectual classes
that would contribute to the "greater, faster, better" China, he did so with the hope that
they could do so in a manner that would benefit the largest swath of population possible.
This directive is something of a contrast to the protected environment at the elite art
academies discussed in the previous chapter. At the Zhejiang Academy of Fine Art in
particular, the Reform Era was not a time of frenzied progress toward a "greater, faster,
better" society, but a time to slowly rebuild an educational institution while making room
for cloistered experiments and extracurricular investigations.
The quote from historian Bao Zunxin (1937-2007), a top intellectual associated
with the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, speaks to the actual development of the
intellectual-academic sphere in the mid- 1980s, almost a decade into the Reform Era. The
Culture Fever that took hold among the intellectuals was not a direct contribution to the
"more economical results" desired by Deng Xiaoping, but it did factor into the
development of mass media in order to flesh out their discussions of culture,
modernization, and the legacy of pre-Maoist Chinese culture in modern and
contemporary China. As Bao presented it, the fundamental question being discussed by
2
0
Deng Xiaoping, Selected Works ofDengXiaoping, 1975-1982 (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1984), 119.
113
intellectuals was whether "ancient culture" would be useful and perhaps integral in
renegotiating modem China in the post-Mao period. This cultural fever played itself out
in academic discussions and their print media extensions: book series andjournals. In
one case, this discussion was also extended to the realm of television broadcasting. This
case, the 1988 miniseries He Shang (River Elegy, K 4), presents an important experiment
whereby the increasingly commercialized world of Chinese television was reappropriated, not by the CCP apparatus but by the intellectual class and the academic
discussions of the "philosophy of culture." This television production presented harsh
criticisms of both modem and Confucian elements of Chinese society. In a preface to the
print edition of the series' script, writer Su Xiaokang described this criticism asfansi (A
Z). Fansi roughly translates to "self-conscious reflection," although the term itself
originates as a Chinese translation of Hegel's nachdenken - reflection after-the-fact that
leads to the elevation of initial intuition to considered concepts. Su's proposition for He
Shang addresses the goal of elevated public discourse:
... [the series] should propose to bring information about all sorts of theories and
thinking to the TV screen in large volume, endowing the film with a clear, rich
and meaty awareness of the philosophy of culture, enabling it to offer people all
sorts of ideas and to create the effect of a two-way dialogue with the audience and
society, in the expectation that the broadcast of [River Elegy] will elicit broadbased concern and discussion.
This sort of design will make what used to be the most important
elements in a television film - frame, music, language, etc. - retreat to a position
of secondary importance, placing the element of thought in first place.... One
could call this an instance of cooperation between television and the world of
thought, an experiment in which the finest minds of contemporary China convey
206
theory and information through the great medium of television.
Su had thus positioned the mass medium of television as a means by which thefansi and
admonitory criticism of elite intellectual circles could involve a wider swath of society to
206
Su, "Self
Questioning," 95-96.
134
the benefit of all. This directly correlates to the Confucian precept that education and
self-cultivation are key components to the development of good government, and that the
criticism and admonition at an individual and societal level are key components to the
development of a harmonious society.
The third epigraph to this chapter comes from Zhang Peili and pertains to his
mode of working in his years after graduating from the Zhejiang Academy of Fine Art in
1984. This particular quote refers to his 1987 conceptual work About X? Exhibition
Procedures, a text published in the periodical Zhongguo Meishu (FineArts China) the following
year. 20 7 This text outlines step-by-step instructions for the execution of works of art, the
artist's X? series, and their amalgamation into an exhibition. Another artwork from 1987,
Art ProjectNo. 2, consisted of similar text, in this case a nineteen-page mimeographed
document containing "a stringent artistic system of rule and procedures." 208 Zhang was
deeply interested in the conceptual foundations of artworks, and with experimenting in
various degrees to which these conceptual art could be executed or not, inexactly
reversing the traditional mode of "act, then report," to "report your intentions to act,
then act, or not." Zhang continued his explanation of his conceptual works by stating,
"...I do not think Art ProjectNo. 2 surpasses visual categories because it uses writings to
empty a visual medium. On the contrary, I believe that because it enables a complete
return of visual experience back to concept, it could be said that the depth of the visual
image is even more real and richer [sic]."
209
This conceptual orientation is quite resonant
with Bao Zunxin's assessment of Reform Era academic discussions about modernity and
207 Smith,
20 8
Nine Lives, 396.
Zhang Peili, "The point of departure for Art ProjectNo. 2 (rwhujihua de er hao) (1988/2008)", in Wu and
Wang, eds., Contemporay ChineseArt: PrmaryDocuments, 112.
209 Ibid
135
Su Xiaokang's englargement of thesefansi diaologues by exploring them in the popular
medium of television.
Zhang Peili's adoption of video as an artistic medium is an extension of his own
conceptual practices and the growing critical and admonitory role that intellectuals
inhabited in the 1980s. Zhang's formation at the art academy during the tenure of Zheng
Shengtian had paved the way for mediatic explorations. However, it is crucial to note
Zhang's appropriation of video, and by extension, television, is a withdrawal from the
public sphere and the popularization of intellectual debates. Su Xiaokang hoped to make
academic diologues on culture part of public discourse:
Some say that we must shatter Confucian ideas and undertake a "wholesale
Westernization"; there are others who say that China's only way out is to adopt "Western
learning for the essential principles, with Chinese learning for practical applications"; and
yet others say that we must reconstruct a "third flowering of Confucian civilization." In
recent years, no matter whether it is the Chinese intelligentsia reflecting [fansi] on the fate
of Confucianism and discussing the question of a cultural strategy, or whether it is the
grand ceremonies in honor of Confucius at Qufu, all of these demonstrate that selfquestioning of the Chinese people has already touched on the very cutting issue of the
choice of a national culture. 210
Zhang Peili, on the other hand is much more ambiguous in his treatment of these public
dialogues, and turned to video to experiment in the discrete realm of fine arts rather than
to participate in the generalized public intellectual sphere.
Philosophical Overtones and The Pond Society
Zhang Peili's eventual experimentation with and adoption of video art as his
primary medium is part of a greater narrative about artistic and philosophical
negotiations in China around 1985. The Zhejiang Academy of Fine Art played an
important role in these, both because of the faculty and resources and the fact that the
institution acted as a convener for like-minded students who were eagerly consuming
210
Su, "Self Questioning," 98.
136
newly-available translations of Western literature and philosophy as well as formerly
forbidden classics of Chinese art. Zhang has spoken about the environment at the
academy and in provincial Hangzhou as distinct from the more politically charged art
world of Beijing in the mid-1980s, stating that "...we didn't see ourselves as heroes of the
world. We were interested in many different things - not just art." 2 11 It was through the
academy that these students and recent graduates were able to coalesce into informal
artists' organizations and organize group exhibitions, a hallmark of the experimental
avant-garde in many contexts. It is my belief that the plurality of topics explored by these
groups is what made the adoption of new art media both interesting and necessary to
Zhang Peili, and that the quasi-official infrastructure that linked these groups to the
academy and the official Chinese Artists Association made him want to set his practice
apart from more mainstream modern art conversations. Although he professes an
innocent, wide-reaching curiosity that led to his eventual experimentation with video as
an art medium, I contend that his turn toward new media was an admonitory move that
conveyed his critique of the Chinese art world as well as the restrictions placed on cultural
practices throughout the People's Republic.
Zhang and his colleagues BaoJianfei, Zha Li, GengJianyi, and Song Ling in
Hangzhou founded the Youth Creation Society (Qingnian Chuangzao She, il
1Ijd
) in
1984, in essence a steering committee to organize a group exhibition of contemporary
artwork by young artists including students from ZAFA. Working with the local branch
Zhang Peili, in discussion with the author at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston,
Massachusetts, 22July 2008. This sense of distance from the overtly political and economic discussions that
pervaded the academic discourse in Beijing was not limited to Hangzhou. It was also expressed by artists at
other provincial art academies, including the Guangzhou Academy of Fine Art which was the subject of the
211
recent Asia Art Archive documentary FromJean-PaulSartre to Teresa Teng (2010), a film that speaks to the
"reading fever" and broad discussions of literature, poetry, and philosophy that contributed to the
exploratory atmosphere in and around the academy in the mid-i 980s.
137
of the Chinese Artists' Association, the committee came up with a curatorial plan for an
exhibition of works in which "modernity prevailed" 212 entitled '85New Space, which was
to open in December of 1985. The works featured in the exhibition were all within the
realm of traditional fine arts, executed in media taught in the art academies: Chinese ink
painting, oil painting, prints, sculpture. These artworks were not thematically cohesive,
but many were composed with a limited, "cool" palate, and much of the subject matter
related to the alienation and detachment of modern urban life. As put by BaoJianfei in
an explanation of the exhibition's works in the national journal of the Chinese Artists'
Association, Meishu:
We make strenuous efforts through constant exploration and self-denial to
understand ourselves, our lives, and the lives of our audience... in order to
discover the meaning of art; content reflecting everyday and ordinary life and
through our simplified images and colors, as well as our heightened quietude, we
express the strength of our souls so audiences not only observe the surface of our
work but pay even greater attention to the space in the work which needs to be
filled with the idea of freedom. 213
While these statements are not attributed to Zhang Peili personally, BaoJianfei was
speaking for the Youth Creation Society about the art scene in Hangzhou. Specifically,
he referred to the individual, contemplative, soul-searching nature of these works and
their conceptual character. Shortly thereafter, Zhang and his compatriots Geng, Bao,
and Song, along with the sculptor Wang Qiang, in Hangzhou disbanded the Youth
Creation Society and formed the Pond Society (Chi She,
'A t),
an artistic collective
specifically committed to exploring these existential themes with non-academic media
such as performance, installation, and video.
212 Lu, A
2 13
history of art in 20th-Centuy China, 861
Fine Arts (Meishu), 2 (1986):48, cited in Lu, A history of art in 20th-Century China, 862.
1.98
Like many of the art collectives in the mid-1980s, the Pond Society was welldocumented and provided some of its own ekphrastic apparatus:
The use of the name "pond" was designed to stress the notion of "saturation" as
applied to two aspects of the perception of "truth", namely the themes of an
artist's work and the effect of art on audiences. We also wanted the word "pond"
to express how the linguistic meaning of art itself was unknowable. The Pond
Society no longer attempted to grasp technique, because we all took the view that
the "sacred" easel was not the only way of relaying the ideas we wanted to
convey. We were making every effort to break the confmes of language and to
advocate a fuzzy form which was a psychologically charged "artistic activity". In
this, painting, performance, video, and the environment (such forms all being
conceptual) could provide the characteristics of visual language and establish an
organic and connected whole. 2 14
This piece on the formation and goals of the Pond Society appeared in early 1987 in Art
Trends an influential periodical published by the Artists' Association of Hubei Province.
215
Made up of contributions from young art critics concerned with philosophical renewal
and innovation in the arts, this magazine was dedicated to "reporting.. .news from the
front line of contemporary art theory." 2 16
The inclusion of the Pond Society's artistic
statement in this theory-driven milieu locates them within a larger academic discussion
that took place in the mid- to late-1980s. Art Trends advocated for a discussion with
philosophical overtones (zhexueyiwei,
r
2*)
A
and it is important to note that the artists
of the Pond Society were very much in line with that branch of art-oriented theory. This
quadrant of the art world fostered a theoretical rather than connoisseurial environment to
discuss contemporary art from China and abroad with respect to a universalized notion
214
Pond Society (Zhang Peili, GengJianyi, and Song Ling), on its founding in 1986, in Art Trends (Meishu
Sichao), 1 (1987): 18.
215 The publication Meishu Sichao, -424/l is sometimes called The Trend ofArt Thought in English-language
materials.
26
1 Koppel-Yang, "Art Magazines and Symposia," 48.
139
of "scientific" and "non-ideological" 217 debate rather than a specifically Chinese or
Reform Era Context.
In the context of the Pond Society collaborations, Zhang Peili explored
installation and performance from 1986-1987. These works all maintained a figurative
element. Work #1: rang's Tai Chi Series (1986) and Work #2: Travelers in green space (1986)
both used larger-than-life-sized two-dimmensional human figures cut out of paper or
paper-board, installing them on a long, high brick wall (Work #1) and suspended between
trees and shrubbery in the nearby forest (Work #2).218 Both of these works included
performative elements. Work #1 was a processual performance initially viewed only by
the artists themselves as they created the large paper figures striking the twelve
fundamental positions of Yang-style tai chi over the course of two days. Once the figures
were installed on the wall, the passersby became participants in the installation simply by
nature of them seeing the artistic intervention in a public space. Zhang Peili declared, "It
was not a novel gaming activity, nor a well-designed experimental art project; it was an
honest and natural dialogue between the artists and the people walking on the street." 21 9
Work #2, in which similar paper figures in tai chi poses were installed in a wooded area
near West Lake, involved a different type of audience participation, where the
performance was the act of the artists inviting and transporting viewers from their normal
urban environment to the nearby forest.220
1
2 7Ibid
Work #1... was a collaboration between GengJianyi, Song Ling, Zhang Peili, and Wang Qiang. Work
#2...
was a collaboration between Zhang Peili, Song Ling, BaoJianfei, and GengJianyi.
2 19
Zhang Peili, "Chishejianbaodierhao (Pronouncement of the Pond Society No. 2),"June 10, 1986, in Gao
Minglu,'85 mei shuyun dong (The '85 movement) (Guilin: Guangxi Normal University Publishing Co., 2008),
198-199; Gao Minglu, Total Modernip, 241.
220 Lti, A histoy of art in 20th-Centuy China, 869.
218
140
Like his proclamation that the artistic investigations in Hangzhou in the 1980s
were simply personal interests, Zhang's dismissal of these projects as essentially unplanned
and without agenda belies the underlying connections that bind the works to traditional
cultural, artistic and scholarly lineages. The removal of these installations from the
context of fine arts exhibitions was an important element of these transmediatic
explorations, a step away from the official realms of education and display. This was also
Zhang's first visual gesture toward a generalized traditional Chinese art form. His recent
oil paintings while at the academy all featured recognizably modern Chinese figures:
swimmers at an indoor swimming pool; musicians and their Western brass, woodwind,
and percussion instruments. In Work #1 and Work #2, the symbolism of the tai chi
practitioner is thus multivalent: for all the Pond Society artists it is a step away from the
types of human subjects they had previously depicted; it is also a nod toward the
traditional arts of China and a type of "connected whole" that included literary and
physical practices, perhaps more so than visual art; and placement of the tai chi figures
progressively further away from the modem institutions of education and public
exhibition, first on the street, then in the forest, evokes the trope of the scholar-turnedhermit, a powerful symbol of considered protest in Chinese culture.
This last point, the consideration of the artistic subject as a continuation of the
trope of the hermit, is a nuanced reference that requires careful consideration. The
robust education in art technique and in modem art history at ZAFA was supplemented
in no small part by traditional Chinese art history. Even the moniker Pond Society takes
on a specifically Chinese meaning when considered in this light, elucidating the artists'
slightly opaque explanations of the term "pond" and its connotations of saturation by
calling to mind the scholar-recluse's retreat into nature, typified by the Zhejiang-based
141
Yuan dynasty painter Wu Zhen (1280-1354) in his HermitFishennan on Lake Dongting (1351,
National Palace Museum, Taipei) depicting or at least referring to the incorruptible first
century scholar-hermit Yan Ziling. 221 This character-type was found throughout Chinese
history, but there was plenty of room within the identity of the hermit to remain a part of
the everyday world, as the members of the Pond Society did with their experimentations
just outside the art world that they still sometimes inhabited. These degrees of eremitic
protest were well-defined by the Tang poet BoJuyi (772-846):
The great hermit is at court
The small hermit is inside a hillside plot.
A hillside plot is too solitary a place,
And court and city are too turbulent.
Best of all is the middle hermit,
222
-- a hermit in the nominal post of a secretary.
While the Pond Society artists have not spoken about these references in particular, they
are so generally known that it would be exceedingly likely that any artists who had
graduated from an elite art academy would be familiar with them as historic precedents.
It is also important to note that amid the general Culture Fever and Reading Fever of the
1980s that sparked the reinvigoration of the arts and sciences, there was also a strong
current of neo-Confucianism and neo-traditionalism. 223 This chaotic mixture of widely
Hay,John. Boundariesin China. London: Reaktion Books, 1994, pp. 1 29-130.
222 BoJuyi, in Wu Hung, The Double Screen: Medium andRepresentation in ChinesePainting(Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1996), 46.
223
Confu-cianism writ large became extremely important in the immediate years following the death of Mao
Zedong in 1976, resulting in numerous academic conferences and the creation of Confucian studies
institututes. The resurgence of interest in Confucianism in the intellectual sphere in the Reform Era was
largely predicated upon examining the importance of a society based on rationality, stability, and order that
Confucianism held in common with the Western Enlightenment tradition as well as Marxism.
Confucianism was present in 1980s intellectual discourse in several manifestations. The New Confucianism
of the 1920s, inherited by Mou Zongsan (1909-1995) in the 1980s, stressed moral spirituality and the
Chinese incorporation of Buddhist and Daoist religiosity to bridge gaps in Kantian transcendental
aesthetics. Li Zehou, one of the Reform Era's leading philosophers and leading authorities on Chinese
intellectual history disavowed any affiliation with Mou's brand of New Confucianism. Instead Li
incorporated Confucius (or, the Confucian socio-cultural legacy), Kant, and Marxist historical materialism.
(Lin, Galikowski, The Searchfor Moderni , 91; Wing-cheuk Chan, "On Mao Zongsan's Idealist
221
142
divergent theories collapsed across social, cultural and historical divisions allowed for
artists to cherry-pick and collage their influences. Especially with regard to Chinese art
history, modem artists in the 1980s were able to integrate generalized conceptual
elements into their work in unproblematized gestures, much like the intellectuals at large
who were actively looking to mix a few elements of pre-Maoist culture into their
discussions.
One more cultural reference to tai chi that the Pond Society would have been
aware of begs mentioning - the general cultural interest in the traditional martial art of
qigong
) "cultivation of vital energy," that developed throughout the Reform Era
and had reached "fever" status by the mid-1980s.
Although slightly different from each
other in form and application, both taijiquan (k;K*), which roughly translates to
"supreme ultimate fist," and qigong are "inner" martial arts and operate on the principle
of harnessing and directing the body's qi or vital energy through movement, breath
control, and meditation. This practice is rooted in longstanding martial arts like those
studied at the Wu Tang monastery in Hunan province, but it only began to be codified as
a distinct practice in the seventeenth century within the context of the closed ranks of the
Chen family in Henan province. Their lineage of martial arts was related to military
techniques like those published by the Ming dynasty general Qijiguang in the New
Treatise on Disciplined Service (efiiao
Xinshu,
?6th4 -t) in the mid-sixteenth century.224
These boxing moves were blended with with qigong breathing techniques for a practice
Confucianism," in Confucian Ethics in Retrospect and Prospect, eds. Qingsong Shen and Kwong-loi Shun,
(Washington, D.C.: Council for Research in Values and Philosophy, 2008) 171; Sung-hwan Yi, A
Topography of ConfucianDiscourse: Politico-PhilosophicalReflections on Confucian Discourse Since Moderniy (Paramus,
NJ.: Homa & Sekey Books, 2006), 52; Sylvia Chan, "Li Zehou and New Confucianism," in New
Confucianism: A CriticalExamination, ed.John Makeham, (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 105).
224
QJiguang,Ji xiao xin shu (c.1562) (Taipei: Guang wen shuju, 1976).
143
focused on health benefits rather than combat techniques. This practice only became
known to the wider public after the first student from outside the Chen family, Yang
Luchan (1799-1872), began to teach it to a general population in his native Hebei
province, modifying the system to eliminate strenuous and athletic moves. 2 25 One of
Yang's students was from an elite scholar-gentry family that was able to introduce Yang
to upper-level officials and Qing Imperial Guards in Beijing, where he then relocated in
order to spread his teachings which segued well with the general cultural interest in
modernized adaptations of Chinese traditional practices as part of the Self-Strengthening
Movement (1861-1895). Yang's sons and grandsons continued instruction in taijiquan,
further modifying the forms and techniques to make the practice even more accessible to
practitioners of all fitness levels, especially the elderly. These teachings were further
spread in the 1930s when Yang Luchan's grandson Yang Chengfu (1883-1936) published
training manuals and other educational materials. This was roughly contemporaneous
with the Chen family's debut teaching taijiquan to a general audience in Beijing in 1928,
and the publication of the Chen Family TaijiquanIllustratedin 1933 and subsequent
publication of additional expanded volumes beginning in 1935.226 Chen-style and the
more widely known Yang-style taijiquan in nineteenth and early twentieth century China
was extremely important in the conveyance of ostensibly "traditional" Chinese cultural
practices. That these practices were actually fairly recent developments, hybridized and
modernized to make them palatable to the masses instead of the martial arts elite, was
rarely mentioned.
225 Barbara Davis and Weiming Chen, Tajiquan Classics: An Annotated Translation (Berkeley, Calif: North
Atlantic Books, 2004), 11.
226Jbid, 9, 11.
144
In the Reform Era, the physical practices of taijiquan and qigong were taken up
by groups all over China as a collective activity, in no small part because of the ostensible
link that these practices provided to "traditional" Chinese martial arts. 227 That the
conveyed "tradition" might be a false one did not go unnoticed, nor did claims of health
and longevity that were proclaimed in absence of scientific proof. AsJing Wang has
noted in her book High Culture Fever, the re-discovery of qigong during the reform era was
often lamented by intellectuals as a sign that an illegitimate pseudo-science could easily
invade the realm of academic and cultural discussions.
As one disillusioned intellectual put it, this was not a period in which heroes were
given birth. This was, on the contrary, an era in which "our nation is seeking
inspiration from the symbols of ancient civilization, i.e., the Great Wall and the
dragon. Individuals, on the other hand are searching for formulas of longevity
228
from qigong."
The controversial but popular nature of taijiquan and qigong practices would have been
very apparent to the Pond Society, and the inclusion of the figures in Work #1 and Work
#2 should be taken as an understanding of their self-conscious place as cultural observers
and critics. Their own lineage as Chinese artists who might assume the status of great,
small, or middle hermits in order to best comment on society and its power structures was
thus combined with their position as modem artists and intellectuals that learned from
and poked fun at mass culture and its imprecisions.
227
Anthropologist Thomas Ots has written extensively about the implications that the neo-Daoist practices
of tai chi and qigong became extremely popular during the Reform Era because of the "collective catharsis"
achieved by the reclamation of this health practice that had been branded as superstition during the
Cultural Revolution.
228 Wang, High Culture Fever, 38.
145
30x30
Zhang Peili's membership in both the Youth Creation Society and the Pond
Society is important when considering the admonitory gesture of his first work of video
art, 30x30 (1988), and in his pursuit of video as an artistic medium in the late 1980s. The
well-known piece, taped as one long static shot, shows an industrial-tiled floor and the
crossed legs and white-gloved hands of an anonymous person, actually Zhang himself,
who drops and shatters a glass mirror, glues it back together, drops it again, and
reassembles it once more for the entire duration of the 180 minute videocassette. This
piece was developed to be shown at the second Huangshan Conference, held in 1988,
itself a planning meeting for the proposed 1989 exhibition China/Avant-Gardeto be held at
the National Art Gallery in Beijing. Many artists from avant-garde enclaves all over
China presented their recent works, and Zhang screened the video with the condition
that the piece, unedited and without titles of any sort, be considered for concept rather
than technical skill. 229 His appeal to ignore the technical deficits of this experimental
work is interesting for many reasons given the context of the screening. As with his
statements that Work #1 was not "...a well-designed experimental art project," 230 this selfdeprecation for the rough and unfinished nature of experimental forays into nonacademic media speaks both to his own pride as a talented academy-trained oil painter
and his criticism of this very skill. Bristling at the academic emphasis on technical
prowess endorsed by the beaux-arts and Soviet curricular methods that resulted in his
own facility, he asserts incompetence while positioning himself as a concept-generator.
Despite his interest in experimenting outside of his metier, he remained self-conscious of
229
La, A histoy of art in 20th-Centur China, 874.
Zhang Peili, "Chishejianbao dierhao (Pronouncement of the Pond Society No. 2),"June 10, 1986, in
Gao,
The '85 movement, 198-199; and Gao, Total Modernity, 241.
230
146
presenting such unrefined work, especially in the context of the Huangshan Conference,
where other artists trained as oil painters would be displaying their work in that medium.
Also, by demurring as to the technical quality of the work, Zhang was able to craft the
screening to become less about the work itself and more about the personal experience of
each viewer. In a 1989 letter to the art historian LU Peng, Zhang emphasized the
internalized participation required of each audience member:
I believe that people watching this video for 180 minutes will also experience
exhaustion and bored agitation. This is the most direct experience and is real.
Since we can calmly accept all the events we encounter in life, we have no reason
23
to reject feelings created by our visual experience. '
His emphasis on the psychological and physical experience of the viewers allows him to
claim the work as a naive experimentation, pushing the agency towards the audience.
This stands in stark contrast to the overt editorial messages of the programs broadcast on
China Central Television (CCTV), a topic that will be explored in more depth later in
this chapter.
Zhang's emphasis on the individual psychological and physical responses to
watching his tedious work and his deadpan presentation effectively allowed him to
sidestep the rich formal and symbolic implications of 30x30, which need to be addressed
prior to discussions of the specific significance of video in art history and in China.
Mirrors carry specific meaning in Chinese culture and art, as some of the finest art objects
from the Bronze age and as objects thought to be imbued with protective and magical
qualities.
The mirror - shattered, reassembled, and then re-shattered and re-
reassembled could serve as an easy metaphor for the state of Chinese society or
government - which had undergone radical disruption and re-building, a story that
231
Zhang Peili, letter to Lu Peng, 1989, quoted in Li, A history of art in 20th-Centuy China, 874.
147
repeats itself and is applicable to almost any historical time: the Reform Era, the People's
Republic Era, the twentieth century, the modem era initiated by the Opium Wars of the
nineteenth century, or the entire dynastic history of China, human civilization, etc. The
form of a perfect square is also loaded with symbolic meaning in Zhang's world - the
urban square was an important element of Maoist city planning, and functioned as a part
of imperial city planning and cosmology. The piece's filmic references are also plentiful,
invoking Alain Resnais' New Wave film L'Annie Dernirea Marienbad(1961) and its
painfully long shot that shows a waiter's hands slowly picking up the shards of a broken
glass one by one, and the silent surrealist film Un Chien Andalou (1929) by Luis Buiuel and
Salvador Dali, in which the disembodied hands of Bunluel hold a woman's eye open prior
to slicing it with a razor in the opening scene. The mirror's significance in Western art
history, both as a tool for rendering perspectival accuracy and as s visual convention
represented within the composition, is equally important when considering this first video
created by an oil painter.
For our purposes, the most significant implications of Zhang's use of a mirror in
his first video work is the traditional reading of literati scholar-artist's work as a mirror for
the society at large in general and rulers in particular. These narrative paintings and
illustrations were understood as societal critique and comment, and were frequently
metaphorically referred to as reflections or mirrors. The literal use of the specific word
"mirror" also appears often with regards to moralistic art, as in the Emperor'sMirror,
Discussed and Illustrateda late Ming compendium of didactic anecdotes of historic and
legendary emperors, and in the Song dynasty art critic Guo Ruoxu's eleventh century
148
work Ovenriew ofPaintingin which he refers to the use of paintings as "advisory mirrors" by
emperors and Confucian officials. 232
This last point, that the entire oeuvre of an educated Confucian scholar-artist was
intended to hold a mirror up to China's leaders and induce considered, critical selfreflection is quite significant for our reading of Zhang Peili's initial foray into video art.
His audience was composed of elite modem artists at the cutting edge of a cultural and
artistic avant-garde who were themselves forming a sort of institutional framework. They
rejected official styles and artistic practices, yet were almost all the products of official art
education institutions. They clamored to be exhibited and written about in exisiting
venues, while forming new circuits for the reception of their work. They participated in
quasi-mainstream events and forums, and created works that included typically
"Chinese" visual elements without necessarily reflecting the quotidian experiences that
Zhang and his Pond Society colleagues so highly valued.
Thus, the physical discomfort that Zhang inflicted with his monotonous threehour video project was in part an admonition -artists should be made uncomfortable for
not holding up the mirror to themselves and their society in an authentic way. As the
inaugural work of video art in China, 30x30 carried with it a radicality and a call-to-arms
that Zhang nonetheless disavowed. The piece, he said, was merely a reflection of his
personal interest in mediatic experimentation and a natural interest in a contemporary
art medium that had already been explored extensively in the West andJapan. 233 30x30
was an invitation for himself and his fellow artists to investigate the possibilities of nonFor more on these specific examples and on the implicit Confucian morality embedded in traditional
Chinese literati art, see the work of the art historian Julia K. Murray, including: Julia K. Murray, "From
Textbook to Testimonial: The Emperor's Mirror, an Illustrated Discussion (DiJian Tu Shuo/Teikan
Zusetsu) in China andJapan," Ars Orientalis 31 (2001): 65-101; andJulia K. Murray, Mirror ofMoraigp:
ChineseNarrativeIllustration and ConfucianIdeologv (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2007), 75 & 84.
2 33
Gao, Total Moderniy, 241.
232
149
academic media to critically examine their own modern practices, and a reminder that
the role of the hermit-critic need not be fully inscribed within nor fully dismissive of the
norms and institutions of society. This step beyond the non-academic realms of
installation and performance was both about the specific possibilities of video, and the
consideration of what any conceptually "new" medium could offer an artist.
The title 30x30 also merits discussion before proceeding to an exploration of
television and broadcasting in China. Although ostensibly a simple measurement of the
piece of mirrored glass that is broken and reassembled in Zhang's video, the number
thirty (sanshi)also relates to a Chinese proverb that had specific significance in the Reform
Era. This proverb, "sanshinian hedong sanshi nian hexi," literally translates to "thirty years
east of the river, thirty years west of the river." The implication is that prosperity,
political trends, or intellectual currents have life cycles and shift back and forth over
generations, and the differing and opposing populations will each have their day. The
specific span of thirty years was quite significant during the Reform Era. The Mao era
had lasted approximately thirty years, from the founding of the People's Republic in 1949
to Deng Xiaoping's ascension in 1978, and speculations about China's future often used
that round number to contemplate the nation's future. The other implication of choosing
a title that had resonance with the hedong.. .hexi proverb is the image of he, the river. As
will be explored in the latter part of this chapter, the seminal television series He Shang
(River Elegy) was an unavoidable cultural touchstone and an important point of
comparison for any critical video word. In addition, the intellectual activities of the 1930s
in China were relevant to Reform Era discussions of Chinese modernity, as has been
explored in previous chapters of this dissertation, and the legacy of the generation of the
1930s was well known in at the art academy.
150
TV Broadcasting and Video Art in China
Upon publicly sharing his first foray into video art, presented as a real-time
recording of New York traffic resulting from the Pope's 1965 visit (though this story may
be apocryphal), NamJune Paik declared that, "Television has been attacking us all our
lives, now we can attack it back."2 34 This statement embodies much of the violently antiestablishment mentality that propelled artists to experiment in video, both with respect to
the art world and the media landscape of the mid-twentieth century. Compare this
dialog with dominant broadcast media in the West to the circumstances surrounding the
adoption of video as a fine art medium in China in the 1980s. Television sets were far
from ubiquitous in China, with less than half of Chinese households owning a television
set in 1988, the year Zhang Peili created 30x30.235 For those who had access to television,
broadcasting was fairly limited. The turn toward video was not a challenge to the visual
vocabulary of television, but a simultaneous exploration of the medium's creative
potential. Zhang Peili's evolution from an oil painting student to a video artist was a
result of his own curiosity about the new and arcane technology of video, as well as his
considered criticism of the government's use and editing of mass media in general in an
era of sharply contradicting policies of political control and economic liberalization.
Consider the history of television and the state of broadcasting in the 1980s in
China as a backdrop to the exploration of video as a new fine art medium. Mass media
under Mao was uniformly steeped in ideology; programming merely supported Mao's
successive mass mobilization campaigns. Experiments in broadcasting technology in
234 Quoted in Julia Knight and Peter Thomas, ReachingAudiences:Distributionand Promotion ofAlternative Moving
Image (Bristol, UK: Intellect, 2011), 21-22.
235 Kevin Latham, Pop Culture China!: Media, Arts, and Lifersle (Santa Barbara, Calif: ABC-CLIO, 2007), 47.
151
1956 at the Central Broadcasting Science Research Facility and the Beijing Broadcasting
Equipment Factory utilized Soviet technology and the aid of engineers from the Soviet
Union. 236 China's first television station was launched in Beijing in 1958, the same year
that the country's priorities for the medium of television were succinctly articulated in
reports to the CCP's Central Committee and the State Council. These guidelines ranked
the goals of this new type of visual broadcasting as follows:
1)
2)
3)
4)
5)
To
To
To
To
To
propagate the policy of the Party and the State
report the achievement of the socialist cause
proliferate technological and social education
enrich the cultural life of people
promote international exchange 237
This reflects the Party's consideration of the medium as a communications tool and not as
a creative industry. Unlike the inherently commercial overtones of television
broadcasting from the West, Chinese television was strictly government-financed and did
not allow commercial advertising until the early Reform Era.23 8 The governmental
apparatus that controlled broadcasting was complex, and television falls both under the
supervision of the Radio and Television Bureau and the CCP's Propaganda Department
which is itself under the Political Bureau of the Central Committee. This structure meant
that the television programming was an outlet for Official dictates, communications, and
culture. As a point of comparison, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) in
the U.S. was mainly charged with establishing uniform technical standards at the onset of
commercial broadcasting when it was established in 1934, and with maintaining a "public
interest standard" with respect to the growing number of competing commercial entities
236
Ibid, 46.
237 David Ward, Television and Public Policy: Change and Continuiy in an Era of GlobalLiberalization(New York:
Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2008), 91.
junhao Hong, "China," in Enyclopedia of Television, ed. Horace Newcomb (New York: Fitzroy Dearborn,
2004), 511.
238
152
in the 1960s. 2 3 9 The FCC was created with a no-censorship provision, although
legislation in the mid- 1970s established the commission's authority to restrict indecent
and obscene material. 240
After the establishment of Beijing Television (BTV) in 1958, a station was
established in Shanghai that same year; by 1961 twenty-six other provincial television
stations had been established. This network remained partial and unconnected
throughout the Mao era, and it wasn't untilJuly 1976, a few month's before Mao's death,
that there was an attempt at producing a national news broadcast. It was only in 1978,
the year Deng Xiaoping assumed chairmanship of the People's Political Consultative
conference, that this news broadcast, Xinwen Lianbo (*r ft
4)
24
1,
really became
influential.24 2 In many respects, television broadcasting in the Reform Era was a
completely new medium. Television sets had only become commonplace in Chinese
homes in the early to mid-1980s, coinciding with an exponential growth in television
stations which increased from 52 in 1983 to 202 in 1985.243 Ideological control over
programming content was loosened significantly, and self-consciously apolitical
entertainment programming was given more airtime than ever before. 24 Imported
television programs were strictly limited to those that conformed to state-approved
239 Hugh Richard Slotten, Radio and Television Regulation: Broadcast Technology in the United States, 1920-1960
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), 68-70; Kimberly Zarkin and MichaelJ. Zarkin, The
Federal Communications Commission: FrontLine in the Culture and Regulation Wars (Westport, Conn: Greenwood
Press, 2006), 6.
240 Stanley D. Tickton, "Obscene/Indecent Programming: The FCC and WBAI," in Censorship, Secrecy,
Access, and Obscenity, ed. Theodore R. Kupferman (Westport, Conn: Meckler, 1990), 59.
241 Xinw en Lianbo is still the premier national news broadcast in China, a thirty minute program broadcast
daily on almost all stations at 7:00pm, uninterrupted by commercials.
242
James Francis Scotton and William A. Hachten, New Mediafor a New China (Malden, Mass: Wiley-
Blackwell,
2010), 86.
24 3
Ibid
244 By the mid- 1980s, entertainment programming doubled, taking up 55% of airtime.
Lent, (1986) quoted in Junhao Hong, The Internationalizationof Television in China: The Evolution ofIdeolog,
Society, and Media Since the Reform (Westport, Conn: Praeger, 1998), 100.
153
themes in the late 1970s and early 1980s, but by the mid-1980s the thematic nature and
variety of programming expanded significantly.
Liberalization and diversification in the telecommunications sphere waxed and
waned in the Reform Era. For example, in 1983 when the Party's nation-wide Anti
Spiritual Pollution Campaign called for a sharp decrease in imported television content
like the American show The Man From Atlantis and soap operas from Mexico, Brazil,
Japan, Taiwan, and Hong Kong.245 The censorship system was generally loosened
throughout the rest of the 1980s, and content increasingly tended toward pure
entertainment. 24 Another exception came in 1986 with the Anti Bourgeois
Liberalization Campaign that specifically attacked Western influence and thus curtailed
the amount of imported Western television programming. However, the Chinese
Communist Party adopted its 7 Five-Year Plan in 1986, a plan that recognized the role
of mass media in both informing and entertaining the nation. 24 7 This policy reflects an
internal struggle within the Party's leadership between factions that argued for strict
limitations on television programming content in order to better preserve Chinese culture
and values, and those who advocated for increased exposure to Western culture and
television programming in order to show Chinese citizens the value of social progression,
innovation, and technological advancement.
245 Hong, Internationalizationof Television in China, 102; Min Wang and Arvind Singhal, "'Ke Wang,'
a
Chinese Television Soap Opera with a Message," Gazette: InternationalJournalof the Science of the Press 49, no. 3
(1992): 181.
246 Hong, The Internationalizationof Television in China, 100.
247 Ibid, 99.
154
River Elegy and the Media Landscape of the late 1980s
The premier screening of Zhang Peili's first video work 30x30 occurred in
November 1988 at the second Huangshan Conference, a gathering of art critics and
theorists organized by Gao Minglu. The Huangshan Conference occurred prior to any
screening of examples of Western video art. 2
8
It is extremely important, however, to
note that 30x30 was realized in the same year as the watershed documentary miniseries
He Shang. This six-part television event broadcast on CCTV injune of 1988 presented a
critical analysis of Chinese culture and tradition, using the Yellow River and the dragon
as symbols of China's enduring backwardness and calling for the nation's modernization
and Westernization. It became a point of discussion and generated controversy for its
polemical narrative, and the ensuing debates among China's intellectuals were
widespread among many disciplines as well as within the upper ranks of the CCP. The
He Shang controversy was centered around the series' central argument that China needed
to modernize and Westernize to avoid further stagnation that had held the nation and
culture back for thousands of years.
For the purposes of this dissertation, He Shang is important as an indicator of the
evolution of television as a medium involved in cultural and political discourse in China
as well as an example of cultural criticism in the intellectual and public spheres. As the
2 48
The screening of Western video art in China took place in 1990. Ernst Mitzka, a visiting scholar from
Germany, had brought with him video art pieces that he had produced as part of a celebration of the 900"'
anniversary of the founding of the city of Bonn. These pieces were originally broadcast on Germany's first
non-public TV channel RTL (Radio Television Luxembourg). The screening of these pieces was a major
event at the academy, with over 500 students, professors, and recent in attendance. Mitzka had been invited
to ZAFA for a one month visiting professorship by Shu Chuanxi, a faculty member in the Chinese painting
department who had studied in Germany in the late 1950s. In a 2012 recollection of the screening of the
videos he had brought with him, Mitzka states that, "People from the Chinese TV were at the screenings
and invited us to one of their meetings to see more of the videomaterial [sic], but after judging some of the
stuff as obscene(it was the two dots and the triangle of Friederike Petzold), we were quickly dis invited [sic]."
(Ernst Mitzka, "Visit in china," email message to the author, 23 April 2012.)
1.55
former, He Shang was an exceptional example of the navigation of multi-tiered censorship
measures that prevented the publication or production of materials deemed ideologically
problematic or harmful to government objectives. While He Shang and television
programming in general was not exempted from governmental review and censorship, it
is important to understand that television production was less regulated than print media,
the mass medium that received the most scrutiny throughout the history of the People's
Republic.
The official system of review developed soon after the establishment of the
People's Republic, and was further solidified during the Cultural Revolution. In the
realm of print works, previously independent publishing houses were nationalized starting
around 1951 when they were first converted intojoint private-public ventures before their
full transition to public concerns by
1954.249
All works were subject to evaluation by an
editor, editorial supervisor, and chief editor, all of whom would have been Party members
committed to cultivating a long career of official advancement with little incentive to err
on the side of allowing the publication of materials that might be deemed questionable.
This process was especially effective because the editors were not censors by trade, but
intellectual professionals who were capable of assessing works based on style, content,
tone, and oblique references. 250 During the 1980s, despite the official encouragement to
"reform and open up," intellectuals who were interested in pluralizing cultural and
intellectual discourse through journals and cultural events came up against these
processes of official review that were still firmly in place.
2 49
Fangzheng Chen and GuantaoJin, From Youthful Manuscriptsto River Eegy: The Chinese Popular Cultural
Movement and Political Transformation 1979-1989 (Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, 1997), 98.
2 50
Chen andJin, Youthfid Manuscriptsto River Elegy, 99.
156
The non-governmental sphere in the 1980s was thus to be negotiated by carving
out minjian or "folk" publications, events, and media by working within the official
parameters but circumventing the thorough editorial process. Some such periodicals
such as the 1980 series routhfulManuscipts(Qjngnian Wengao,
-*!CA) were presented as
collected essays in order to circumvent the strict supervision that accompanied the
publication of newjournals, but such efforts were usually somewhat short-lived. Touthful
Manusmipts itself was quickly shut down after it was brought to the attention of the bureau
of Publication Administration. 25 1 The contradictions embedded in this process of
liberalized print media and the entrenched system of review were the result of the highlevel disagreements within the CCP. Intellectuals were inspired by the liberal leader Hu
Yaobang, General Secretary of the Party, who advocated for the role of China's
intellectual elites in the nation's economic and social development. He promoted the
rehabilitation of intellectuals who had been purged during the Cultural Revolution. He
also developed educational policy and media campaigns that promoted intellectual
inquiry and frowned on dogmatic adherence to Maoist dictates. 252 Hu's resignation,
forced in 1987 by a leftist Party faction, signaled a brief reactionary turn by Deng
Xiaoping and was something of a shock to the intellectuals who had been committed to
liberalizing and pluralizing the public sphere. This setback, however, was not enough to
counteract the momentum that had built up throughout the 1980s, and intellectuals
continued to push for a diversified and less regulated media environment as part of the
Chen andJin, routhfid Manuscripts to River Elegy, 105; William C. Godby, "Televisual Discourse and the
Mediation of Power: Living Room Dialogues with Modernity in Reform-Era China," in Civic Discourse, Civil
Society, and Chinese Communities, eds. Randy Kluver andJohn H. Powers (Stamford, Conn: Ablex Pub. Corp,
1999), 130-133.
252 Carol Lee Hamrin,. "Conclusion: New Trends uner Deng Xiaoping and his Successors," in China's
Intellectuals and the State:In Search of a New Relationship, eds. Merle Goldman, Timothy Cheek, and Carol Lee
Hamrin (Cambridge, Mass: Council on East Asian Studies, Harvard University, 1987), 286.
251
157
modernization and "New Enlightenment". For example, less than a year after Hu's
resignation, Gan Yang and other elite students of Western philosophy, all intellectual
proponents of modernization by the introduction of Western thought, created Culture:
China and the World, another series of collected essays.25 3 This series survived long enough
to publish five issues, from December 1987 through 1988, including many translations of
important Western philosophical works as well as the editorial staff's own articles on the
need for China to reform and modernize.
This background of attempted circumvention of the Party's review mechanisms
by intellectuals and the periodic quashing of these efforts by the robust censorship and
review processes makes it all the more remarkable that He Shang was produced and aired
with such little interference or censorship. The origination of the documentary project He
Shang relates to the minjian cultural space that evolved throughout the 1980s, disguising
crticism of the center with a "rural" rumination, a mode reminiscent of the couched
admonition of the "middle hermit." CCTV had produced and aired several short
documentary minjian topics, more or less human-interest stories, as part of its news
broadcasts starting in 1985. CCTV even approached the editorial staff of Towards the
Future, the important book series which had a similar editorial program to Culture: China
and the World, to develop cultural television programming on topics that it had explored in
its printed volumes. Not much came of these discussions until the end of 1986, when a
feature on Towards the Future was produced, then abandoned when the views of the series'
253
Joseph Fewsmith, China Since Tiananmen: The Politicsof Transition (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge
University Press, 2001), 96.
158
co-editorJin Guantao were deemed too controversial to be given national exposure
through CCTV.2 54
All this is to say that television, along with other Chinese mass media in the 1980s,
was neither fully in the hands of the "enlightened" intellectuals pushing for cultural and
academic liberalization nor entirely under the control of Party cadres committed
exclusively to pro-governmental propaganda. The fact that River Elegy, a program with a
critical and leftist editorial message, was part of the media landscape of 1988 is an
important factor in understanding Zhang Peili's experimentation with video that same
year. He did not seek to "attack" television the way that NamJune Paik did in 1965, as
television was not the dominant public communications medium. Instead, he saw the
potential of video to help reinvigorate avant-garde art experimentation the way that the
medium of television was slowly altering the cultural landscape of everyday people. It is
the confluence of the creation of a non-governmental public sphere by elite intellectuals
and the liminal space occupied by cultural televisual enterprises within the state-run
broadcast media that created the conditions for artistic experimentation with video, and
in particular Zhang Peili's experimentation in with long-duration, deadpan, absurdist
piece. It was the novelty and potential of the medium that created a modern space for
Zhang to inhabit as a critic, observer, and producer of cultural discourse.
25 4
Chen andjin, routhful Manuscripts to River Elegy, 216.
159
Chapter 5
Performance Art and the Enactment of Admonition
This final case study explores experimentation with performance art by the artist
Zhang Huan in the early 1990s after his graduation from the Central Academy of Fine
Arts (CAFA). His artistic experimentation during the subdued cultural climate after the
crackdown on student demonstrations in Tiananmen Square inJune 1989 is an
important counterpart to the admonitory video and installation work of his immediate
predecessors.
The liberal and humanistic tenor of Culture Fever during the mid-1980s had
made room for some admonitory discourse in the quasi-official spheres of print media
and broadcasting. In the 1990s, these intellectual discussions took a nativist turn, looking
more to models from Chinese history and less to the foreign sources that had taken hold
during the reading fever of the 1980s. A seminal 1994 article in Literature andArt Debates
(Wenyi
/Ihenming,
irt t +#)
entitled "From Modernity to Chineseness: Inquiry into a
New Model of Knowledge" articulated this shift. 255 Written by Beijing based professors
Zhang Fa, Zhang Yiwu, and Wang Yichuan, the shift was not simply a re-consideration
of nationalism, but a shift in the mode of intellectual inquiry amidst the continual
economic reformation of China.
When examining the continuing experimentation with non-academic media in
1990s China, it becomes clear that there is a generational progression. By the early
Ben Xu, "'FromModerniv to Chineseness': The Rise of Nativist Cultural Theory in Post-1989 China,"
Positions 6, no. 1 (1998): 204-205.
255
160
1990s, the art student cohort, as with other disciplines, skewed toward younger applicants
who had not personally been involved with the Cultural Revolution the way that their
1980s counterparts had. This generational evolution made room for artistic and
intellectual inquiry involving Chinese source material that was less fraught than just a few
years prior. Similar to earlier Reform Era trends, however, the 1990s saw the
continuation of periodic liberalization and pluralization followed by clampdowns and
censorship. In this fragmented milieu after the '85 New Wave, Zhang Huan's
experimentation with performance art is significant, in that it continued the trend of
exploring admonitory concepts through non-academic media following his time at the art
academy.
Xingweiyishu, Performance Art and Behavior Art
256
Forme, pefoming is about not pefonning.
-Zhang Huan, 2005
During the '85 Art New Wave, avant-garde groups and individual artists all over
China incorporated performance pieces into exhibitions that also showcased the intense
artistic activity. The collectively designed performance at the Southern Artists' Salon
First Experimental Exhibition in 1986 was an important experiment in this medium.
This work involved many elements of traditional theater and performing arts: set design,
costumes, and rehearsed choreography that was performed at a scheduled event. 2
7
Art
students from CAFA and the Central Craft Academy organized the performance event
Concept 21 - Art B fore rourEyes on the campus of Beijing University in December 1986.
256
Jiae Kim, "Losing Himself in his Art," Theme (Spring 2005, premier issue), reprinted on
ZhangHuan.com, accessed 10 October 2008,
http://www.zhanghuan.com/ShowText.asp?id=9&sClassID=3.
257
ThomasJ. Berghuis, PerformanceArtin China (Hong Kong: Timezone 8, 2006), 58.
161
This group's name derives from the idiomatic expression "buguan san qi ersh'yi," - literally,
"it doesn't matter if three times seven is twenty-one," - which loosely translates to an
optimistic exclamation like "throw caution to the wind" or "regardless of the
consequences." This performance was a collective action: the participants wrapped
themselves in black or white strips of cloth that resembled bandages; they then "attacked"
each other by throwing paint on their bandaged bodies; collectively, the group walked
across campus in a way that mimicked contemporary student protests, shouting the
names of important places in Chinese culture and history. 25 8 The "bandages" were partly
in homage toJim Dine's 1960 happening Car Crash, and the paint "attacks" were
enactments of the violent militaristic vocabulary that had infused their generation's
education and upbringing. 25 9 Concept 21 member and CAFA student Sheng Qi (b. 1965)
described that "...even our art education indoctrinated us in military terms such as 'wage
warfare,' 'liberate,' 'unify,'... Although we were so young, we all had this feeling of being
wounded." 26 0 This group was especially concerned with the "performative" aspects of
performance (biaoyan, AU*). After this initial event, the group changed their name to
Concept 2 1 Century, and over the following two years enacted performances at some of
the historic sites that they had shouted as part of Concept 21 including the Great Wall and
the Ming tombs on Beijing's far northern outskirts. 26 '
Like Wu Shanzhuan and Zhang Peili, many artists in the 1980s had begun
experimenting in non-academic media that they had encountered through the
information flowing to the elite academies. These two key figures experimented with
2 58
Berghuis, PerformanceArt in China, 52; Robin Visser, Cities Surround the Counryside- UrbanAesthetics in Post-
Socialist
China (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2010), 153.
2 59
Visser, Cities Surround the Countyside, 153.
260 Sheng Q, quoted in Visser, Cities Surround the Countyside,153.
261 Berghuis, PerformanceArt in China, 62.
162
performance themselves in 1986 and 1987 - Zhang Peili had participated in
performances as a member of the Pond society, and Wu Shanzhuan created many
performances as part of his Red Humor series, a conceptual umbrella that he returned to
throughout his career. Many of the '85 Art New Wave experiments were included in the
landmark exhibition "China/Avant-Garde" at the National Gallery of Art in Beijing
which opened in February of 1989. A large-scale survey of work generated during the '85
Movement, this exhibition is usually located as a watershed moment for performance art
in China because of the high profile notoriety that the medium gained after the arrest of
the artist Xiao Lu following her performance at the opening. A few hours into the
opening reception, Xiao Lu fired several gunshots into her installation Dialogue (1989, in
collaboration with Tang Song). The government then shut down the exhibition and both
Xiao Lu and Tang Song were arrested. This caused a chilling effect on all performance
art, soon to be followed by more outright repression of all kinds of activity following the
Tiananmen Square crackdown inJune that same year. For years after that, performance
art went underground for several years, and events were staged in a somewhat ad-hoc
manner to stay beyond the reach of the law.
This lineage, however, does not situate the work of Zhang Huan, "the earliest and
262
most influential full-time performance artist of the 1990s," according to Gao Minglu.
As briefly discussed above, although many '85 Art New Wave artists were experimenting
with performance art in the late 1980s, they did so in conjunction within a larger body of
artistic production, and often as part of a collective. The performance pieces created in
the late 1980s were thus related to the '85 Art New Wave spirit of experimentation, part
262Gao Minglu, "Private Experience and Public Happenings, the Performance art of Zhang Huan," in
Zhang Huan: Pilgrimageto Santiago (Barcelona: Cotthem Gallery, 2002), reprinted on ZhangHuan.com,
accessed 10 October 2008, http://www.zhanghuan.com/ShowText.asp?id=26&sClassID=1.
163
of an organized exhibition or happening, designed to gain public exposure, and often in
dialogue with iconic contemporary works from the West, like Jim Dine's Crash or the
large oeuvre of Robert Rauschenberg, including documentation of performances, that
had been exhibited at his widely attended solo show at the National Art Gallery in 1985.
Zhang Huan, in contrast, came to performance art and also came to Beijing
slightly later than the older artists associated with the '85 Movement, after there was an
already a contemporary art scene comprised of artists with a collective history. I would
argue that Zhang's early work, which he began while in residence in Beijing's nowfamous East Village prior to expatriating to New York in 1998, is largely the product of
an inward-looking process that must be historicized with respect to Confucian eremitic
practices rather than the performance art of the '85 generation. In the grammar of
Zhang's performances, his body became both subject and object. This is a contrast to the
example of the Concept 21 artists. Their bodies were also the "objects" that were acted
upon, but the "subject" could be understood as either an atomized collective or the
general Reform Era milieu that had wounded them. Zhang Huan's engagement with
photographers and videographers (especially the artist Rong Rong) to produce artistic
documentation of his early performance work is a key component to understanding his
solitary, eremitic pursuit, and its distinction from the collective performance works of the
1980s. It is by engaging the documentary apparatuses of photography and video that he
was able to preserve elements of his behavioral performance while maintaining his status
as a hermit, withdrawn from the main spaces of the art world.
In Chinese, performance art is usually called xingweiyishu (415
-
), which
translates approximately as "behavioral art." This term is an interesting entry point into
164
the early work of Zhang Huan, whose body of work in many ways can be better
understood as "behavior" than "performance." In the early 1990s, Zhang began pursuing
performance as his main medium, concentrating on acts that would draw attention to and
amplify his everyday experiences. He did this in an ascetic manner, attempting
"behavior" in order to come to a deeper understanding of how he was negotiating the
world through his sensual experiences. In his own words on the occasion of a
retrospective exhibition in 2007:
My inspiration comes from the most common and trivial things in daily life,
such as eating, sleeping, and going to the toilet. I try to discover and
experience the essence of human nature from ordinary life. I try to
experience the body and reality - survival. I despise the performing quality
263
of the works."
These works, specifically the iconic 12 Square Meters (1994) which will be investigated at
length in this chapter, present an interesting set of questions with respect to the
reinterpretation of Confucian admonitory practices in Reform Era art. First, the question
of taxonomy arises, and a need to distinguish between Zhang's "behavioral art" (xingwei
yishu) and the "performances" (biaoyan) of the Concept 21 collective and the Southern
Artitst' Salon. This distinction offers a nuanced understanding of medium and genre in
the Reform Era context. While the specter of Euro-American art canons is never far
from the interpretation of Zhang's work, his practice is also profoundly linked to
Confucian eremitic sources and the Chinese concept of the human body as shenti (k-), a
"lived body" that incorporates mutually dependant mental and physical processes.26
This concept is connected to the practice of "forming one body with our surroundings" in
26
3 Zhang Huan, "A Piece of Nothing," in Zhang Huan: Altered States, ed. Melissa Chiu, (New York: Asia
Society, 2007), 59.
264ThomasJ. Berghuis, "Close Encounters - Performance art practices in China during the 1990s and the
role of the mediated subject of the acting body in art," in ShajahInternationalBiennial 6, eds. Peter Lewis and
Hoor al-Qasimi (Sharjah, UAE: Sharjah International Biennial, 2003), 35-36; Drew Leder, "Chapter 6:
To Form one Body," in TheAbsent Body. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990, 149-202.
165
Neo-Confucianism, and provides another avenue to explore the experimental
performance work of Zhang Huan. 265
Formation and Education
Zhang Huan was born in Anyang, Henan province in 1965.266 His parents soon
went to find work in a larger city, sending one-year-old Zhang and his three brothers to
live with his grandparents and other relatives in the countryside for eight years. He has
not shared childhood memories of the Cultural Revolution, but he has spoken often of
the impoverished circumstances that he grew up with: his direct contact with nature, the
limited food resources, and the simplicity that accompanied this poor, rural lifestyle,
including the practice of children going nude when the weather was hot.267 Later, when
he rejoined his parents and attended elementary and middle school in Anyang, Zhang
missed the freedom of the countryside and did not do well with the discipline of the
classroom. He did poorly in school and started spending all of his free time drawing,
alone. 268 As a result, he gained facility at sketching and in fifth grade was singled out for a
special art training class, a Soviet style (Su style) art education based on the Chistyakovian
methods employed at the art academies in the mid-twentieth century. 26 9 He failed the
college entrance exams several times but was eventually admitted to the oil painting
department at Henan University in Kaifeng. He graduated in 1988, after which he
265
Berghuis, Perfornance-Artin China, 66.
Yeon Kim, "Brief Artists' Biographies," in TranslatedActs, 109.
Zhang Huan. "A Piece of Nothing," 52.
268 Michele Robecchi, "Zhang Huan speaks with Michele Robecchi, Milan, 8thJune 2005," in
Conversations
with Photographers(Spain: La Fabrica, 2006), reprinted on ZhangHuan.com, accessed on 12 October 2008,
http://www.zhanghuan.com/ShowText.asp?id=
11&sClassID=3.
269
Zhang Huan, "A Piece of Nothing," 53.
266 Yu
267
166
taught Western art history at Zhengzhou Education College, also in Henan. 270 While in
Zhengzhou, he appealed to the administration of his college to send him to Beijing to
continue his studies, and in 1991 his petition was granted. He moved to Beijing to begin
a master's program in oil painting at the prestigious Central Academy of Fine Arts.
Zhang's personal history and training are of special interest when evaluating his
early performance works for several reasons. First, he is situated by this history as a
culturally Henanese person. He has stressed that this provincial identity made him
distinct from many artists in Beijing, and was a factor that brought him together with a
few other artists newly arrived from the provinces in Dashancun village, soon to be
named the East Village by Zhang, on the northeast outskirts of the city. This village was
a cheap place to live, an especially important factor for those without the social networks
of family and work unit (danwei,
-443)in Beijing. Chinese rural-to-urban migration
increased in the 1990s, especially the "floating" population of migrants who relocated
without an official residence permit (hukou,
y 1)
and often lived in substandard housing
as a correlary. 27 1
Zhang's personal trajectory also places him slightly outside the main currents of
modern Chinese history. He was born just before the start of the Cultural Revolution but
raised somewhat out of the way of its disastrous effects and was too young to have firm
memories of that period. As a college student during the mid- to late-1980s, he was privy
to some knowledge of the conceptual and performance art stemming from the '85
Movement, but his Soviet style training and provincial academy gave him limited
resources and little first-hand exposure to the avant-garde currents. Unlike his
270
Chiu, Melissa. "Altered Art: Zhang Huan," in Chiu, Zhang Huan:Altered States, 14.
271Xin Meng, Labour Market Reform in China(Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 143.
167
contemporary Ma Liuming, who was also studying oil painting at a provincial university
(in his case, Hubei) but had a teacher who was part of the '85 Movement and worked in
the medium of performance, Zhang had never been exposed to performance art before
coming to Beijing. During his college years, while studying oil painting, he was
interested in the work of Millet and Rembrandt although he had little access to
information about or images of their work. 2 72 Perhaps most important to keep in mind
about his personal timeline, Zhang was still living in Henan until 1991, and was not
exposed to the Stars art group in 1979, the extremely influential Robert Rauschenberg
exhibition in 1985, the China/Avant-Gardeexhibition in 1989 or the student
demonstrations that led to the violent crackdown in Tiananmen Square on June 4h of
that same year.
When he arrived at the Central Academy in 1991, Zhang pursued studies similar
to those he had already completed in Kaifeng. Both universities employed the Soviet
methods in which mastering the "texture and spatial quality of a painted object" was
paramount. 273 As his awe of the venerable institution and its professors began to fade, he
began to branch out on his own and look for new sources for his art, mostly drawing from
the library at the Central Academy. His extra-curricular reading was a solitary pursuit, as
the reading groups and cultural discussions of the 1980s had long since disbanded. It was
in CAFA's library that he first saw the photo-performance work of Tseng Kwong-Chi, a
Hong Kong born, Paris educated artist who had lived in New York's East Village from
1979 until his death in 1990.274 Tseng's self-portrait series are beautifully composed
images of the artist wearing a "Mao suit" - the ubiquitous communist uniform of mid272
Zhang, "A Piece of Nothing," 53.
273 Ibid
274 Chiu,
"Altered Art: Zhang Huan," 15.
168
twentieth century China, which he purchased in a New York thrift shop - and mirrored
sunglasses while posing in front of a tourist site, monument, or remarkable natural setting
in North America or Europe.
In his early days in Beijing, Zhang Huan also came across a book based on
lectures given by Zhao Wuji while a professor at the Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts in
the 1940s that was in circulation among many artists working in Beijing at the time.
Zhao's writings were critical in changing Zhang's perspective on art, and a means by
which Zhang was able to receive the teachings of Zhao, Lin Fengmian, and the other
professors at ZAFA in the 1930s and 1940s. In Zhang's words:
First, Zhao says that every part of a painting should be different from its other
parts. We need to activate every part to let it breathe and to give it life. Second,
you don't paint a thing because you want to paint that particular thing, you paint
for your own heart, to express yourself. These two ideas completely changed my
understanding of Su-style painting and broadened my thoughts. Before, I painted
what a teacher asked me to paint. [After,] the teacher would spend two hours
arranging lighting and positioning a model, but when the teacher stepped out of
the studio, we would ask the model to lie on the floor. Later I would paint only a
hand or a foot as I chose. I even made sketches that looked like nothing at all.
When the teachers at the art institute saw my work, they said that I didn't need
model [sic] any longer and could go home...
For a long time [after reading Zhao Wuji], I could not feel a connection with
two-dimensional materials. I tried different mediums to get the feeling of
closeness. Once, I found the bottom half of a plastic mannequin. One of the legs
was black and hollowed. I put it on my bike and went home. I put one of my
legs in one of the hollow mannequin legs - I had three legs. I suddenly felt I
understood something extraordinary.... I felt that I found a way of walking - of
being - that I could not have achieved before. The manner of my body's
275
participation completely moved me.
Thus, as Zhang began to explore different means of expressing his own artistic impulses,
he was guided not by a model of performance art imported from the West or investigated
by his older contemporaries during the '85 Movement, but by the words of an influential
mid-century Chinese painter who had been trained in both guohua ink painting and
275
Zhang, "A Piece of Nothing," 53-54.
169
Western painting and eventually developed his own style distinct from the two after he
expatriated to Paris in 1948.276 Similar to the manifestation of Zhao's influence among
students after his visit to ZAFA in 1985, Zhao's effect on Zhang Huan was not in form
but in spirit. While he was not ignorant of the experimental work that was going on in
Beijing at this time, the avant-garde of the 1980s had gone into eremitic withdrawal from
public view. Artwork at this time was in many ways a more private, insular affair, having
gone underground and into the private apartments of artists in Beijing. Zhang was thus
experimenting with performance art on his own, not unlike his early experience with art
as a solitary pursuit during his youth in Anyang. The burgeoning scene in the East
Village comprised of other young provincial artists and musicians thus developed
independently from the '85 New Wave. Although he was connected with other students
and artists at the Central Academy, his new work was coming out of his own desire to
"create for ... [his] own heart," rather than art as a vehicle for social and political
criticism like many of his contemporaries. As he described in a 2005 interview reflecting
on his experimentation with the mannequin leg, "I discovered the body as an important
part of my art. The body is the first language for me. The body is immediate. You can
feel it. You can't feel by drawing." 277
The Beijing East Village (1992-1994)
It was in 1992, when Zhang Huan was beginning to collect objects and
experiment with using his own body in his work, that he moved to Dashancun, a small
village in the Chaoyang district between Beijing's Third and Fourth Ring Roads and the
276
277
For more on Zhao Wuji, see Jean Leymarie, Zao Wou-ki (New York: Rizzoli, 1978).
Kim, "Losing Hlimself ."
170
site of one the city's main garbage dumps. He was still a master's student at the Central
Academy, but he had never had a safe, stable place to live in the city and decided to
move further out in order to afford more space. Before deciding on Dashancun, he
considered moving to one of the established artists villages at Yuanmingyuan and
Songzhuang in the northwestern suburbs. These locations were home to artists, mostly
painters, who were working in the styles of Cynical Realism and Political Pop that had
already attracted international attention and commercial success. His decision to move to
Dashancun was deliberate, made to get away from the commercialism and to some extent
the uniformity that he saw produced in these other artist villages. 27 8
In 1992, Dashancun was populated by several visual artists as well as rock
musicians and other performing artists, as chronicled by the photographer Rong Rong in
Wu Hung's Rong Rong's East Village (2003). Almost all of them were recent arrivals from
the provinces. According to Rong Rong's correspondence with his sister (who was then
still living in their home province of Fujian), these artists all came to the village for the
cheap rent and were not necessarily aware of each other's presence or acquainted with
each other at first, working somewhat independently and living alongside other poor
village residents, most of whom made their living by sorting through garbage. 279 Zhang
also began collecting and sorting through garbage, eventually breaking through to the use
of found objects and his own body with the mannequin leg described earlier. Slowly, he
came in contact with other avant-garde artists in the neighborhood, sometimes by
chance, sometimes introduced through friends like Zhang Yang (a colleague from the
2 78
279
Zhang, "A Piece of Nothing," 57.
Wu Hung, RongRong's East Village (New York: Chambers Fine Art), 2003.
171
Central Academy) or Li Xianting (a more senior artist and critic in the Beijing avantgarde). 28 0
The word began to spread about the artists working in Dashancun and
momentum began to build, with more artists moving to the village. Zhang began to be
excited by the possibilities of working alongside and in collaboration with other noncommercial experimental artists. He read the Taiwanese artist Yang Zhihong's book
Thoughts on Contemporary Art in America and had heard about the East Village neighborhood
in Manhattan from the avant-garde artist Ai Weiwei, who had just returned from living in
New York for twelve years (1981-1993) and was eager to encourage young Chinese artists
to pursue the kind of experimental, conceptual art he had come in contact with abroad.
In October of 1993, the UK-based performance artists Gilbert and George who had an
exhibition on display at the National Gallery of Art in Beijing, visited the village and
witnessed several performance art pieces. 28' With all this interest in and encouragement
from artists who had worked abroad, Zhang decided to unofficially rename Dashancun
the Beijing East Village, hoping that it would live up to its New York namesake and
become a thriving center for the noncommercial, experimental avant-garde. 28 2
In 1993 Zhang's first public performance, Angels, was staged outside the National
Gallery of Art, where a group show featuring Zhang and his fellow CAFA graduates was
being held. In this performance, created in response to the many unmarried friends he
knew who had become pregnant and felt their only option was abortion, he played a
soundscape of Pink Floyd's The Wall and covered his body and fragments of dolls in a
blood-red liquid. He then assembled the fragments to compose a new "whole" doll, and
2 80
Zhang, "A Piece of Nothing," 57.
281 Berghuis, PerfomanceArt in China, 102-103.
282 Chiu, "Altered Art: Zhang Huan," 15.
172
proceeded into the gallery where he hung the "angel" on the wall. This performance
ultimately led to the exhibition's early closure, with Zhang forced to pay a fine of 2000
renminbi and write a self-criticism.
283
This work, performed in front of an audience of
artists from Dashancun and Yuanmingyuan, is remarkable in Zhang's early oeuvre in its
overtly social and political overtones and in its overt performativity. Angels also reveals an
important development in the culture of the art academy. Although the piece was
controversial and Zhang was reprimanded for having executed it, he had felt compelled
to perform it in conjunction with his departmental graduation exhibition. Where Wu
Shanzhuan and Zhang Peili had remained confined to the medium of oil painting during
their time as students at ZAFA in the 1980s, Zhang Huan's tenure at CAFA in the 1990s
coincided with the recent pluralization of art practice; he felt empowered to act on his
own "sincere sentiment," embodying the qualities of an artist articulated by Lin
Fengmian several decades prior. 28
By 1994 Zhang had distanced himself further from the influence of the academy
and had become more focused on his everyday experiences living and working in the East
Village. That year, he created one of his most important works, 12 SquareMeters,
stretching definition of performance art and calling up the semantic differentiation
between performance art and its eremetically-inflected variant "behavior" or xingweiyishu.
While creating this work, Zhang also negotiated his "lived body." According to Zhang, "I
created [these] two works.. .to directly reflect our lives in the East Village." 28 5 The urge
to create a work of art that would "directly reflect" life in their particular impoverished
283 Qian, Zhijian. "Performing Bodies: Zhang Huan, Ma Liuming, and Performance Art in China," Art
58.2 (Summer 1999), p. 62.
Journal
284
Lin Fengmian, quoted in Crouch Contemporary Chinese Visual Culture, 176.
2 85
Zhang "A Piece of Nothing," 58.
173
urban enclave is completely in line with the Neo-Confucian trope of "forming one body
with ... [his] surroundings." 286 The first performance was 12 Square Meters. Zhang sat for
an hour in a village public toilet on a hot summer afternoon, covered with honey and fish
sauce to help attract flies:
One day after lunch, I went to the toilet as usual. The sun had just come out
following a rainstorm, but there was no place to stand in the toilet for it was
flooded. I had to bike to another public toilet in the village. It was relatively
cleaner. When I stepped in, thousands of flies swarmed toward me... This was
my life, and no one could experience it but me... Several days later I realized the
performance... I sat upright and unsupported in the middle of the toilet for an
hour. My body was covered with honey and fish juice, and before long, flies were
all over my body, even my lips and eyes... In the course of the hour, I tried to
forget myself and separate my mind from my flesh, but I was pulled back to
reality again and again... An hour later, I walked out of the toilet and into a
nearby pond that was polluted with garbage. 287
In this work, Zhang began to play with and eliminate the performative elements of this
type of artistic creation. His decision to focus on a mundane, abject activity shows his line
of inquiry shifting inward. More importantly, the time and location of the performance
underscores this inward focus, away from the event-based nature of performances
executed in conjunction with an exhibition or other happenings. He orchestrated the
event very simply, with only the photographers and videographers that he had recruited,
along with a few village residents who happened to arrive to use the toilet, as witnesses.
Compared with the 1993 performance Angels, he stripped himself completely naked,
eliminated the accompanying soundtrack, and used no props. During the performance,
he was silent and motionless, and the goal became not to accomplish anything or finish a
task, as in Angels, but to endure a set amount of time under the extremely uncomfortable
conditions that magnified his daily routine and emphasized the abject conditions in which
he lived.
286
287
Leder, TheAbsent Body, 149-202.
Zhang, "A Piece of Nothing," 58.
174
Zhang himself has hinted at this when discussing his early work, stating, "in my
performances, I try to experience the body and reality - survival. I despise the performing
[sic] quality of the works" 28 8 (my italics). His overt revulsion at the elements of
theatricality in his pieces and his orchestration of a small event with a long afterlife
(through photos and videos) implies an interesting collapse of the time-based nature of
this event. Zhang alone experienced the hour-long physical stress and discomfort, and
very few people witnessed the event itself. 12 Square Meters, however, lives on, mostly in
photo documentation. The "spectators" thus become those who, weeks, months, and
years after the actual event gain information about it by seeing a photograph and/or
reading or hearing a description of the concept and execution. 28 9 The event is
contemplated in a few moments, a much shorter period of time than the original hour
that the artist dedicated to the project. The static nature of the event means that one still
photograph can fairly faithfully transmit the physical appearance of the artist during the
duration of the performance. Once this image and concept is internalized, the viewer can
then turn to a phenomenological contemplation of the artist's experience that Zhang is
hoping to share with an audience that might also "form one body" and inhabit the artist's
eremitic milieu.
Zhang Huan claims to "despise" the performance aspect of his work because, in
effect, he was not "performing" at all, which implies a level of artificiality. Rather, he was
experiencing the reality of the event in the most direct way he could. He amplified the
288 Ibid.
289
The complex negotiation of the role of the viewer in variants of performance art received a helpful
analysis employingJ.L. Austin's theory of the speech-act in Mechtild Widrich's dissertation, "Performative
Monuments: Public Art, Commemortation, and History in Postwar Europe." This project that has greatly
informed the author's understanding of the audience's agency in the public arena, and how it remains
relevant in the realm of eremitic withdrawal. (Mechtild Widrich, "Performative Monuments: Public Art,
Commemoration, and History in Postwar Europe," (PhD diss., Massachusetts Institute of Technology,
2009.))
175
mundane experience of using a public toilet. The piece was not an attempt to make the
viewers into scatological voyeurs or himself into an exhibitionist. Instead, it offered a way
of thinking about the body's sensual existence and daily experiences, something both
universal and personal, a meditation on the ugly truths of life encountered through the
senses. Even the title, 12 SquareMeters, resists the classification of performance art,
because rather than describing his actions or the duration of the piece, it refers to the
square footage of the location - the public toilet. This refers to the specific site his event,
which remained unchanged after the completion of the event and would continue to
function as a public toilet. The title also refers to the standard measurement of public
toilets in villages like Dashancun throughout China, and the concepts of public toilets
everywhere. His actions were just a heightened version of the reality experienced by
hundreds of thousands of people every day, as described by Zhang's friend Kong Bu,
reflecting on 12 SquareMeters years after the event:
This is the most common kind of latrine used in China. In the summer-time, the
smell of ammonia drives its users to tears. Inside, these spaces are filled with
buzzing flies and maggots climbing the walls. Typically a sign declaring that
"Everyone Bears Responsibility for Public Hygiene" adorns one wall. 290
Through this simple title, Zhang is thus highlighting the stark reality of the poor
conditions that residents of his village lived with. He does not push a message of reform
by drawing attention to the irony that although "everyone bears responsibility for public
hygiene," it is actually under the purview of the government to provide the infrastructure
for public health like modern sewer systems. He simply lived through one of his daily
290
Kong Bu, "Zhang Huan in Beijing," in Chiu, Zhang Huan:AlteredStates, 32.
176
experiences at an amplified level and focused inward. "In the toilet," said Zhang, "I
[could] feel the flies biting me. I experience [d] new things with my body." 291
The work that Zhang was forcing them to face was not so much the event itself,
but a challenge to push the limits of physical endurance in order to transcend the body.
In some ways, these concepts were not far from the physical practice of meditation by
Buddhist monks that had begun to interest Zhang and led to his adoption of Chan
Buddhism later in the 1990s. Where Zhang Peili challenged the audience's patience in
30x30 by forcing them to bear witness to his long and tedious process, Zhang Huan alone
endured the physical exertion of his work, and presented the audience with visual
representations of his experiences.
Eremitic Withdrawal and the Persistence of "real beauty"
The stillness, simplicity, and bodily endurance of Zhang Huan's work from the
early 1990s can be linked to the Zhang's exploration of fundamental bodily sensations
and experiences, an exploration that led him become a practitioner of Chan Buddhist
meditation. With the work 12 Square Meters, Zhang re-enacted the simple and powerful
trope of eremitic withdrawal, implicitly criticizing the state of society and the art world
with his insular performances in the abject surroundings of an impoverished independent
artist. This model of the poor, educated artist who has opted out of public service to
protest an immoral government has many Chinese art historical antecedents: the ragged
hermit of Daijin and the lone fisherman of Wu Zhen, to name a few examples from the
Ming and Yuan dynasties. This trope has more recent manifestations as well, specifically
in the cases of twentieth century exiles Tseng Kwong Chi and Zhao Wuji. Zhang Huan's
291
Kim, "Losing Himself
."
177
work 12 Square Meters is connected to this artistic tradition. More importantly, the work
draws attention to the real performance - Zhang's inhabitation of the role of the scholarhermit through his residence in a poor neighborhood on the fringes of Beijing.
As an elite, academy-trained Reform Era artist, Zhang absorbed the legacy of
many academicians who had come before him, including the Republican Era pedagogue
Lin Fengmian. Zhang's explorations of the non-academic medium of performance was
remarkably resonant with Lin's hope that the academies would form the modem Chinese
artist as a person, "with a spiritual and generous heart, with sincere sentiment, who is
continually searching and thereby creating real beauty." 292
292
Lin Fengmian, quoted in Crouch, Contemporary Chinese Vual Culture, 176.
178
Chapter 6
The Ends of Admonition
The Confucian art of admonition has persisted and been revived in Reform Era
China in many forms, incuding the powerful artworks explored in the preceding chapters:
the chaotic, illegible posters and signs in Wu Shanzhuan's Red Humor (1986); the abstruse
and tedious repair of a shattered mirror in Zhang Peili's 30x30 (1988); and the stoic,
embodied dramatization of life with substandard public infrastructures in Zhang Huan's
12 Square Meters (1994). These works were all experimental forays into non-academic
media, but they were all executed as means of engaging an elite academic audience and
they are all united in their moral messages and conceptual underpinnings. What
happens, then, when a Reform Era artist attempts to address a broader public and more
directly protest official governmental policies and actions?
As outlined in the introductory chapter, the general liberalization of Chinese
public culture paired with steady growth in the Chinese art market created a mainland
Chinese art world and spawned or revived related creative industries. This arts
infrastructure fostered the exhibition and production of art in all media, and many
unofficial artists who expatriated in the 1990s to escape the pressures of working in
China's illiberal cultural milieu returned in the 2000s. This did not mean that the tension
between state and artist was permanently resolved, it simply meant that there were many
more examples of unregulated art events and activities. It is important to note that this
environment is not the direct result of central planning or official policy. The arts after
2000 in China have not been excluded from official scrutiny, as evidenced by the highprofile arrest of dissident artist and activist Ai Weiwei in 2011 and the continual scrutiny
179
of his activities since his release. However, Reform Era policies that encouraged a
transition from state planning to market-driven independence have also precipitated the
contemporary art world and market. That being said, the Chinese government remains a
significant patron and watch guard of the arts in ways that constrain or benefit both
official and unofficial artists.
This persistent state-artist tension is an important factor in understanding the
relevance of the trope of admonition and the literatus-critic in Chinese artists' praxis.
After all, it was the recurring illiberal political environments of dynastic China that gave
rise to a tradition of painting and poetry carefully constructed to mask political dissent.
That the many and varied examples of political and artistic dissent throughout Chinese
imperial history were treated with a broad brush in the post-Cultural Revolution art
academy means that diverse figures were able to be considered together despite their
distinct histories. As I discussed in the preceding chapters, this thick archive of literatidissenters was known throughout the twentieth century by artists and writers.
For example, diverse figures from imperial Chinese history would have been
known in the Zhejiang Academy of Fine Art and the Central Academy of Fine Art where
Zhang Peili, Wu Shanzhuan, and Zhang Huan studied. These would have included
poet-scholars like Qu Yuan (329 BCE - 299 BCE) and Li Bai (705-762) as well as scholars
who additionally or primarily expressed themselves through painting like Su Shi (10361101), Wu Zhen (1280-1354), Huang Gongwang (1269-1354), and Zhu Da (1626-1705).
The socio-political circumstances of each of these figures varied, but the general themes
of their work are similar - their criticisms stemmed from a scholar's moral obligation to
speak against unjust policies or corrupt officials, often by eremitic withdrawal to rural
environs. In the case of our Reform Era artists, the messages were often abstruse and
180
indirect, due in part to their productive encounter with the conceptual foundations of
modernist abstraction - part of their extra-curricular art education. As Alfreda Murck
has convincingly presented in her book Poetry and Paintingin Song China: The Subtle Art of
Dissent (2000), the eleventh century rise of painting as a medium for expression of political
dissent was due to the strict policies enacted in 1060 that made more traditional poetic
commentary and criticism treasonable offences. This forced artists like Su Shi to shift
away from the classical genre of "the poetry of complaint," a term in use as early as the
Han dynasty by China's grand historian Sima Qian (c. 140-86 BCE). In place of
censored text, artists crafted paintings replete with symbolic references to past literary
remonstrances. 293 Murck helpfully acknowledges that the audience for these Song
dynasty paintings was often an elite circle of scholar-artists rather than the actual
sovereign or other elected officials. The artist's motivation was equal parts remonstration
of those in power and expressing frustration to a sympathetic cohort. The medium of
scroll painting was also viewed in small groups rather than publicly displayed, another
factor that speaks to the insular audience of an artist's colleagues and students. As framed
by Murck, "The intent was to empathize with those who had been punished, to ridicule
imperial judgments, and to satirize contemporaries for the amusement and edification of
a trusted circle of friends." 294 The similarities between the uptake of the medium of
painting in the eleventh century and the adoption of experimental art in non-academic
media during the Reform Era are interesting and compelling for many reasons. Without
relying on historical determinism, these similarities present a means of approaching the
concept of "new" media in a specifically Chinese cultural context. This is not because of
293
Alfreda Murck, Poetry andPainting in Song China: The SubtleArt ofDissent (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard
University Asia Center for the Harvard-Yenching Institute, 2000), 1-3.
294
Ibid, 3.
181
an essentialist reading of the Chinese artist, but because these literati painters were
studied by art students in the Reform Era. For example, in addition to the curricular
study of Chinese painting and calligraphy, students of all majors perused early twentieth
centuryJapanese illustrated books on Chinese art history at the library of the Zhejiang
Academy of Fine Arts that had been acquired in the early days of the academy under Lin
Fengmian. These books were a rare means of studying Chinese artists and elements of
Classical Chinese history that would otherwise have been presented through a Maoist
lens.
As discussed in the preceding chapters, the art academies and academia writ large
were the sites in which neo-Confucian philosophy was discussed and incorporated into
the omnipresent negotiations of Chinese modernism, modernity, and modernization in
the 1980s. The ideological pluralization in the non- and semi-official spheres of cultural
production in all media and genres placed neo-Confucian philosophy within the context
of these same negotiations. I believe that the subtle and indirect messages of dissent
(Zhang Peili's perpetually breaking mirror held up to society; Wu's incoherent reworking
of Cultural Revolution hand-written posters; and Zhang Huan's endurance of his living
conditions, amplified) that were embedded in the experimental new media artworks of
the mid- to late-1980s reflect these domestic dialogs. They also expose the inutility of the
official/unofficial dichotomy, as some of these dissident artists had a desire to be part of
China's intellectual leadership without being a part of the official art world. This is
evident in the quasi-official success that Zhang Peili, Wu Shanzhuan, Zhang Huan, and
many other new media artists have achieved in China.
Xu Bing and Qiu Zhijie are two other such prominent admonitory artists working
in new media who have become an integral part of the official art academy system. It
182
might seem like a fairly predictable move for the Chinese government to offer sinecures as
a means of recouping a modicum of influence over these dissident artists who have
achieved international recognition and market success, but these artists also benefitted
from their new found involvement with the Chinese art academies. Xu Bing, a 1987
MFA graduate of CAFA, has spoken about how his current position as a vice president of
the Central Academy has allowed him to tap into its network in order to get to know
contemporary China and navigate the extensive changes that occurred there in the nearly
twenty years since he moved to New York in 1990.295 Qiu, a 1992 graduate of ZAFA,
began teaching at his alma mater which now is called the China Academy of Art in 2003,
the same year that Zhang Peili returned to the academy to found its New Media Art
department. Unlike Xu Bing, Qu remained in China throughout the Reform Era,
although his burgeoning career allowed him to travel abroad extensively beginning in the
mid- 1990s. Qiu's role at the China Academy of Art is to direct the "Total Art Studio" a section of the School of Intermedia Art (formerly the School of Experimental Art) based
on the artist's own practice. His concept of Total Art is based on the many roles he has
played since his graduation from ZAFA, as an artist, curator, critic, and socio-cultural
researcher. 296 He believes that his research-oriented work is the key to the next phase in
art education, developing rich archives on culturally significant touchstones and using
that information as the starting point for long-term multimedia artistic inquiries rooted in
Kyle Chayka and Tom Chen, "VIDEO: Chinese Art Legend Xu Bing on Enduring the Cultural
Revolution and How New York Shaped His Art," ArtInfo.com, 16 April 2012, Web video, accessed 1 May
2012, http://www.artinfo.com/news/story/799216/video-chinese-art-legend-xu-bing-on-enduring-thecultural-revolution-and-how-new-york-shaped-his-art.
295
Meiling Cheng, "De /Visualizing Calligraphic Archaeology: Qiu Zhijie's Total Art," TDR: The Drama
Review. 53, no. 2 (2009): 17-34.
29
183
socialjustice and humanism. Qiu's pedagogy is thus completely intertwined with his own
artistic practice and he involves his students in his ongoing multi-faceted art projects.
297
The many examples of avant-garde and unofficial artists succeeding professionally
in Mainland China and the official art academies after 2000 have been encouraging to
liberal-minded art world players in China and abroad, but need to be understood in the
context of persistently illiberal cultural policies. As this dissertation has argued, in the
1980s, artists were able to pursue experimental art modalities within official institutions.
These artists maintained coded, hidden, and indirect critical practices rather acute and
blatant admonishments regarding specific policies or events. When asked about how far
artists can push the political content of their work in 2011 Beijing, Xu answered that art
can exist in China, "...as long as it's not illegal..." and in the same interview plainly
stated, "Don't ask me if students can do political works." 298 So what happens when an
artist steps outside of the ill-defined boundaries of what is acceptable to official observers
in contemporary China? The high-profile 2011 arrest of the avant-garde artist Ai Weiwei
is a crucial example of the limits of admonition in a contemporary Chinese art practice.
The Formation of an Activist-Artist
Arguably China's most famous artist, architect, blogger, and cultural player, Ai
Weiwei should certainly be counted in the realm of China's artistic intelligentsia, but in
terms of this dissertation he is the exception that proves our rule. Ai was not a product of
the art academy system, but he was raised in exile in far northwestern Xinjiang province
Qiu Zhijie, "'Total Art' Based on Social Investigation," TtshuJournalof Contemporary ChineseArt Vol. 5 No.
2006): 77-85.
3,
(Fall/September
29 8
Xu Bing, quoted in Jamil Anderlini, "Apolitically engaged; Xu Bing makes art that plays wittily with
traditional styles; As fellow Chinese artists suffer a political crackdown, he tellsJamil Anderlini why, these
days, he chooses to work within the system," FinancialTimes 30 April 2011, 8.
297
184
by his scholar-poet father Ai Qng. Arguably, however, Ai Weiwei grew up with some of
the influence of the art academy system circa 1930 and its cosmopolitan, pluralistic
atmosphere as transmitted by his father, who had himself studied briefly at the art
academy in Hangzhou under Lin Fengmian in 1928 before traveling to Europe and then
joining Lu Xun's League of Left-Wing Artists in Shanghai in 1932.299 Indeed, Ai Qing
became a Party member in 1944 during the Yan'an era (1937-1948) and served as
administrative head of CAFA upon its takeover by the People's Liberation Army in 1949.
His banishment to Xinjiang was part of the Anti-Rightist Movement of the late 1950s, and
his primary job in exile was to clean the village's public toilets along with undergoing
reeducation and public humiliation - essentially a preview of the fate of many Chinese
intellectuals during the Cultural Revolution.
The Ai family returned to Beijing in 1976 when Ai Qing was deemed
rehabilitated. By 1979, he was lauded as a model poet of the People's Republic and
elected deputy chairman of the Chinese Writer's Association. 300 During the first years
after the end of the Cultural Revolution, Ai Weiwei studied basic academic drawing
techniques with friends of his father. As the son of such a famous literary figure, Ai
Weiwei was in the company of prominent Chinese intellectuals and as well as visiting
foreign scholars such as the historian Geremie R. Barme, the legal scholarJerome A.
Cohen and his wife, art historianjoan Lebold Cohen. 30 1 Ai Weiwei was accepted at the
Beijing Film Academy in 1978 alongside Chen Kaige and Zhang Yimou but claims to
2
Colin Mackerras and Amanda Yorke, eds., The CambridgeHandbook of Contemporary China (Cambridge,
UK: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 73.
3
0o Li-hua Ying, HistoricalDictionay ofModern Chinese Literature (Lanham: Scarecrow Press, 2010), 3.
301 Geremie R. Barm6, "A View on Ai Weiwei's Exit," ChinaHeritage Quarterly No.26 (June 2011), Web,
http://chinaheritagenewsletter.anu.edu.au/articles.php?searchterm=026_aiweiwei.inc&issue=026.
185
have not been particularly interested in film so much as "escaping society".302 Escape
proved impossible. A member of an elite Beijing cohort with countercultural leanings, Ai
became interested in the city's nascent underground movements of politically-infused-art
(or art-infused-politics) and became a founding member of the loose-knit avant-garde art
group The Star Stars (xingxing).303 He participated in their seminal and extremely popular
1979 exhibition installed outside the National Art Museum, the first unofficial guerilla art
exhibition of the Reform Era, chronicled byJoan Lebold Cohen writing for the Wall Street
Journal in 1981:
The group comprises about 30 artists, almost all amateurs, who decided to hold
an exhibition in front of the National Art Gallery in September 1979, in
anticipation of the celebration of the celebration of the 30th anniversary of the
founding of Red China on October 1, 194-9. As a private group, they couldn't
obtain exhibition space through the art bureaucracy. They were young and
outsiders.
... The group's artistic asset is their willingness to put themselves on the line and
explore. They are hampered by their inexperience as artists and their lack of
technical training. More seriously, they don't have the opportunity to pursue
their art full time, to use art libraries or to travel abroad to study. They are not
considered art specialists and so are denied the privileges of professionals. 304
Ai's artistic formation as a young student was thus shaped by his informal connections to
senior figures of Chinese arts and literature, key Western "translators"; and the
"amateur" artistic experimentation of the Star Stars. His predilection for autonomy
outside the official system was solidified when he left China in 1981 and moved to New
Ai Weiwei and Lee Ambrozy, Ai Weiwei's Blog: Writings, Interviews, andDigital Rants, 2006-2009
(Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 2011), xviii.
303
This group, more commonly translated as the "Stars," derived its name from a 1930 article by Mao that
used a common saying as its title: "A Tiny Spark can set the Prairie on Fire (Xingxingzhihuo, kgi liaoyuan)."
Mao's use of this phrase in an article that compared the small numbers of Red Army soldiers to "tiny
sparks" was referenced often during the Cultural Revolution, and many Red Guard groups chose to take
the name "Prairie Fire." The term xing (star), when duplicated takes on a diminutive connotation, and the
appropriation of this word by the art group referred to their amateurism - they were "small-time" when
compared to the academy-trained elite artists, but might start a fire nonetheless. (Andrews, Paintersand
Politics,428; Hsingyuan Tsao and Roger T. Ames, Xu Bing and Contemporay ChineseArt: Culturaland
PhilosophicalReflections (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2011), 30.)
304
Joan Lebold Cohen, "Chinese Art: Flowering in a Springtime Chill," Wall StreetJournal, 27 February
1981, 23.
302
186
York for twelve years with the express hope of becoming a famous artist in the vein of
Picasso.305 While in New York, he took art classes at Parsons School of Design and the
Art Students League, but most importantly became an avid consumer of the city's
downtown art scene. He lived in the East Village, attended as many gallery exhibitions as
possible, and socialized with a wide mix of artists and cultural luminaries (including his
neighbor Allen Ginsburg) as well as American scholars with ties to China and other
diasporal Chinese artists, writers, and intellectuals.
Ai Weiwei's personal development as an artist in New York was fused with his
political consciousness and activism as a critic of the Party's practices in China and an
advocate for democratic freedoms. Although Ai did not exhibit his work much and
remained a fairly passive participant in New York's art scene in the 1980's, a position he
has described as being "in" but not "of' the New York art world, he worked consistently
on his own artwork in many mediums and joumaled on the Web, in Chinese, about his
understanding of the role of art and the artist in contemporary China.3 06 Along with
other expatriate Chinese artists, Ai wrote a manifesto in 1985 declaring the need for
greater artistic freedom in China, and the obligation of Chinese artists to "help the people
of China to shed the past and transform into a society of free and creative spirits," but this
and other such writing was never published or shared outside their immediate circle until
Joan Lebold Cohen unearthed the document that Ai had given her more than twenty
years prior and presented it at a panel at the Asia Society in New York in 2011.
307
In
1989, as many New York Chinese expatriates mobilized to draw attention to the student
Ai and Ambrozy, Ai Weiwei's Blog, xix.
s0 Ibid.
307 Kyle Chayka, "'A New Beginning for Chinese Art': Read Ai Weiwei's Prophetic, Never-BeforePublished 1985 Manifesto," ArtInfo.com, 1 August 2011, accessed 16 Septmber 2011,
http://www.artinfo.com/news/story/38215/a-new-beginning-for-chinese-art-read-ai-weiweis-propheticnever-before-published- 1985-manifesto.
305
187
democracy movement and the Tiananmen Square massacre, Ai gained some notoriety
for his protest actions. He, along with other Chinese artists living in New York,
collaborated with his close friend Ethan Cohen, a budding SoHo gallerist and the son of
Jerome andJoan Lebold Cohen, to devise exhibitions, fundraisers, and a street fair to
draw attention to the student movement and protest against the government crackdown.
Ai also participated in an eight-day hunger strike and formed an organization called
Solidarity for China in conjunction with New York based professionals and scientists from
China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong. Speaking to the New Tork Times about the group's
goals, Ai spoke primarily in terms of political advocacy:
We are contacting all human rights group [s] to prepare for a renewed democracy
movement... We want to bear witness to what really happened and we want to
pressure the Chinese Government to be less brutal, because we know that the
Chinese Government wants relations with the West, and, especially, with the
United States... We need sanctions to show our moral stance, but we cannot
push too far. China's relationship with the West is what really keeps the hope of
democracy alive, and we do not want to encourage anyone to go back to the old
ways that existed under Chairman Mao. That would be too terrible.3 08
From this early point in his career as an artist-activist, Ai refused the genuflection
required of artists, even unofficial ones, in China, and was a vocal advocate for
widespread reform. This direct criticism of governmental policies remained a salient
component of his methodology and artistic practice upon his return to China in 1993 to
be with his ailing father and act upon the modes of artistic experimentation that he had
observed in New York.
308 Ai Weiwei, quoted in Michael T. Kaufman, "New Yorkers Try to Defend Students
Hunted in China,"
New York Times 22June 1989, BI.
188
Installations and Incarcerations
Ai Weiwei's artistic and intellectual formation was a unique combination of
Maoist doctrine, elite Chinese literary theorization, Reform Era amateur
experimentation, and contemporary Western art education - all annealed by his capacity
to be a keen cultural observer of the crucible that was the downtown New York art scene
in the 1980s. As with many of his compatriots who remained in China during the
Reform Era, Zhang Peili and Wu Shanzhuan in particular, Ai claims that some of his
most profound artistic influences were Marcel Duchamp, Dada in general, and Andy
Warhol.3 0 9 As an art student in New York, away from the specific cultural and
intellectual milieu of China's art academies, Ai's access to the art history, art works, and
artistic progeny of Duchamp and Warhol was through immersion in the New York art
scene and virtually limitless literature on these topics.
His approach to installation art, one of the many media we have examined in this
dissertation, is directly related to his immersion in New York. This experience was free
from the strict curricular limits imposed at China's art academies, but also devoid of the
Chinese art history that comprised a significant portion of the academic syllabi for Ai's
compatriots on the Mainland. Also, Ai did not experience the Reading Fever that gave
rise to extra-curricular study groups concerned with obscure twentieth century Western
philosophy. Thus, the indirect and oblique criticisms examined in this dissertation and
embedded in the new media work of Zhang Peili and Wu Shanzhuan resulted from both
the circumstances of their artistic and intellectual formation and the continued pressures
of uneven reform. Ai's work, on the other hand, reflects a multimedia contemporary art
309
Ai Weiwei and Charles Merewether, Ai Weiwei Works, Beijing 1993-2003, (Hong Kong: Timezone 8,
2003), 10.
189
practice that is less specific to China, and perhaps as a result is more understandable and
celebrated by non-Chinese viewers.
The contrast with artists at the core of this study is useful in illuminating the limits
of admonition. It is helpful in this regard to compare a few more lines from the manifesto
penned by Ai and other New York based Chinese Artists going by the group name
Chinese United Overseas Artists to the contemporaneous words of Wu Shanzhuan in
Zhoushan, Zhejiang province.
From Wu in 1986:
I believe that between art and artist lays a vast blind ocean... As soon as...
[art]... is born it lives with complete freedom... When a person guides it down a
particular road, the question of whether that road is the right or the wrong one is
something that person himself must face; because [in its blindness] it will accept
gladly the guidance of others, unfazed by their number. 310
From Chinese United Overseas Artists, written in New York in 1985:
Freedom is the condition for creativity; only through creativity can we truly
experience freedom... The creative spirit honors tradition by breaking with
tradition. Only by continuously moving away from tradition can we cultivate
tradition.311
These two manifestos reflect a generational concern with articulating the policies and
aims of contemporary Chinese art practice and in so doing defining the artist's role in
society. Both essays deal with the concept of freedom as an integral component of art in
contemporary China. In Wu's purposely opaque prose, the freedom is accorded to the
art objects themselves, in a "blind" process detached from the agency of the artist.
Rather than a corpus of art being seen as the tool of its creator, or of the policymaker that
contributed to its ideological content, Wu asserts that once created it possesses the
310 Wu,
"Silent Ocean."
311Chayka,
"A New Beginning for Chinese Art."
190
"freedom" to be used, interpreted, or appropriated. In the hands of Ai Weiwei and the
United Chinese Overseas Artists, by contrast, freedom is a pre-condition necessary for the
creative noesis implicit in the generation of an original art practice. In their statement,
tradition must be "broken with" in a creative milieu in order to be re-cultivated. This is
an interesting parallel to the creative re-inhabitation of Confucian admonitory modalities
by experimental Chinese artists during the reform era. Despite this resonance, the
oppositional understandings of the role of freedom in art are clear. In Wu's estimation,
art must be free to exist and be misused and misinterpreted in an imperfect and
ideologically fraught society. In Ai's, the artist must first be free in order to create, while
the artistic process then reinforces the artist's freedom.
Given these divergent beliefs, it is not surprising that Wu, along with Zhang Peili
and other members of their generation that graduated from China's art academies in the
1980s and early 1990s have pursued careers that have been more or less contained within
the art world, both domestically and internationally. Even
Qiu Zhijie's conception
of
Total Art is contained within the realm of art and the art academy. His expanded
practice that includes non-art research simply informs his artist's archive. Qiu is able to
inhabit many different roles, and to put feelers out into other disciplines, but never crosses
out of the rarefied space of the art world. Ai, on the other hand, has worked domestically
and abroad on non-art projects, pursuing the social and political activism as well as the
art that contributes to his pursuit of "freedom." Before concluding with an investigation
of Ai's 2010 installation Remembering and its relationship to the non-art-world activism that
led to his arrest and detention in 2011, I present the interesting case of Ai's 1995 work
Droppinga Han dynastp Urn. In this work, Ai is captured in three photograpsh documenting
the urn's short fall from the aritst's hands to the ground, concluding with the shattered
191
fragments of the ceramic antiquity strewn near his feet. This iconoclastic but creative
destruction of tradition is a direct embodiment of the Chinese United Overseas Artists'
manifesto - he breaks the priceless objects with immense historical value in order to
"break with tradition." Not only does he break the "classical" tradition represented by
the Han dynasty urn, he makes no attempt to reassemble the shards and thus breaks with
the legacy of tedious repair established by Zhang Peili in 30x30. Ai's presentation of this
work as three sequential photographs allows for instantaneous consumption of the action.
Zhang's painstaking reassembly of the shattered mirror in 30x30 is a protracted exercise
in patience, both for the artist and the viewer. It is this investment of time and
consideration on the part of the audient that places 30x30, a poor-quality video that
chronicles the breaking and repairing of an unremarkable square of mirrored glass, in the
tradition of Confucian literati art. Ai performs a swift and decisive modernist break with
tradition accessible to general audiences from around the world, where Zhang has
prepared an experience for a conclave of his peers, the inheritors of the scholar-artist
tradition.
The cultural liberalization in China that occurred in the decades since Zheng
Shengtian's tenure at ZAFA was widespread, the official tolerance for overt criticism
remained fairly minimal. As the political scientist Richard Curt Kraus has articulated,
cultural reform in China has largely been an afterthought, tangential to the Party's goals
of economic growth and political stability. While corruption is widely tolerated as an
unavoidable accompaniment of desired growth, any challenges to political stability and
single-party rule are taken very seriously. The 2009 arrest and detention of the writer
and Nobel Peace Prize winner Liu Xiaobo on charges of subversion of the state, and the
2012 detention of the legal activist Chen Guangcheng are examples of the Party's swift
192
and decisive action with regards to individuals perceived to threaten that stability. While
Ai Weiwei has worked openly as an artist, architect, and activist in China since his return
in 1993, he has consistently tested the limits of his admonitory practice in the
contemporary political climate. He has not withdrawn from all official connections; on
the contrary, he accepted a 2002 commission for a park in the city ofJinhua, Zhejiang
province that would serve as a public memorial to his father who died in 1996. He
collaborated with the internationally known architectural firm Herzog and de Meuron for
this project, and then continued the collaboration to design the iconic Bird's Nest
Stadium for the 2008 Beijing Olympics. Despite his early design work on the stadium, Ai
became an outspoken detractor of the Olympic project and its heavy-handed urban
renewal.
Ai's boycott of the Olympics gained him notoriety, but no official sanction or
interference; the architectural design work that went into the stadium more than made up
for any grassroots complaining on the part of a few citizens. His personal investigations
into the governmental corruption that was revealed after the 2008 Sichuan earthquake,
however, were coupled with his artistic projects in a way that was deemed much more
dangerous. The substandard construction practices that led to the structural collapse of
schools and the death of thousands of school children were questioned by many activists,
but Ai's voice was distinctly heard throughout the nation and the world. He posted his
findings about these inferior school buildings on his widely-read blog and was able to
garner international attention before authorities shut down his blog a week after the May
8 earthquake. He was twice physically assaulted by police in Sichuan, resulting in
significant head trauma that was treated with brain surgery in Germany in September
193
2009 when he arrived for the installation of his exhibition So Sorry at the Munich Haus
der Kunst. 312
The powerful installation Remembering (2010), was a new work created for So Sorry,
covering much of the museum's fagade in a 10m by 100m mosaic composed of thousands
of brightly colored children's backpacks. The bags were arranged to form readable
Chinese characters that formed the phrase "She lived happily on this earth for seven
years," a direct quotation from a bereaved parent of one of the children killed when her
school collapsed during the 2008 quake. This work marked a departure from much of
Ai's previous installation work which had functioned more independently from his
political activism. Colored Vases (2006/2008), a set of Neolithic ceramic containers that Ai
dipped in colored industrial paint, and Sunflower Seeds (2009), a ton of hand-painted
porcelain seed replicas, are examples of his recent installation practice. They offer
layered references to Chinese history and culture, but in an oblique fashion overlaid with
a mandarin aesthetic, simple shapes, and a refined color palette. Remembering on the
other hand, utilizes a linguistic signifier that presents a direct connection to a particular
historical event and Ai's own involvement with its ongoing ramifications, as chronicled in
his widely-read blog that was reinstated a few weeks after the earthquake. This entry
from 28July 2008 is a good example of Ai's editorial voice as a citizen-investigator and
government critic:
How many people were actually killed and wounded in the Wenchuan
earthquake? How did they perish, and who should shoulder the blame?
Confronted with this question, the responsible Ministry of Education and
Ministry of Architecture are refusing to answer, they want to eternally play dead.
The parents of those school children are helpless, even though everyone
now knows what happened, and why death descended upon those children. All
this was predestined, this was their reality, the only reality they might encounter.
"Ai Weiwei undergoes brain surgery after beating," ArtInfo.com 17 September 2009, accessed 30 April
2012, http://www.artinfo.com/news/story/32619/ai-weiwei-undergoes-brain-surgery-after-beating/.
312
194
In their reality, there is no alternative fate, no other voice or alternative hand that
might lead them on the path to fairness, or extend to them even the slightest bit
ofjustice. They are saying, "It wasn't just a natural disaster," but who pays
attention? The response is: We cried our eyes out when it was time, we donated
with all our strength, what else do you want?
... In this world, there are only two kinds of history and reality, two kinds
of institutions and governments: the ethical and the nonethical... In a society
without democracy, there will be no space for the masses to speak their minds,
and no possibility for safeguarding the power of the people's livelihood - the
result is a deceitful and degenerate reality. The masses don't need pity after
injury, they need even more a strong institution of self-protection, they need to
know the facts, and they need action, the power to participate and refute.
It's easy to say that democracy is good; it protects the weak. Within any
other system, the majority of weak populations has difficulty gaining protection.
Only in democratic societies is it possible to return power and dignity to the weak
and impoverished. Don't make decisions on behalf of the people; let them take
their own initiative. To give them back their rights is to take responsibility and
return their dignity to them.
Who will answer for China the question of exactly how many students
died as a result of these tofu-dregs schools313 ? And to the villains in Sichuan:
Does this really require concealing state-secrets? Is it really so hard to tell the
3 14
truth, about even such things?
This musing on ethical and unethical societies, mass agency in the absence of democracy,
and a blatant accusation that official Ministries are "playing dead," presents a clear
picture of Ai's identity as an activist. Another blog post, written in May 2009, a few days
before the first anniversary of the earthquake, utilizes the same quotation he employs in
Remembering
The rules of this ancient game are dear, they are based on eternal principles:
encourage lies, erase memory, those who cause disasters escape, the innocents
will be punished.
As for the innocents in this menacing place, there is but one possibility
that might relieve them from suffering and big farewell to abandonment: make
zealous pleas for the truth, calmly reject further lapses in memory. Tryjust this
once, for the daughter you will never see again, for she who "lived happily in this
world for seven years," Miss Yang Xiawan, and for her mother and the
thousands of unfortunate parents like her. Continue to inquire about the "tofudregs engineering," interrogate every hour of every day, until our problems
313 The term "tofu-dregs" is used in China to refer to shoddy workmanship, and the phrase "tofu-dregs
schools" (doufuzha xiaoshe) has become universally employed to refer specifically to the type of school
buildings in Sichuan that collapsed during the 2008 earthquake as the result of both local corruption that
allowed for substandard construction practices and the lack of national oversight of local government
officials.
314 Ai Weiwei, "Does the Nation have a List?" 28Ju1y 2008 blog post, translated and reprinted in Ai and
Ambrozy, Ai Weiwei's Blog, 178.
195
become a part of reality, until every "tofu-dregs" structure is exposed and
collapses. Under extremely paranoid rule, being a chronically "paranoid citizen"
is today's only possibility for living happily and healthily.3
15
With this context of Ai's extensive writings and pro-active rallying to keep these issues in
the public consciousness, Remembering serves as a billboard-sized version of his digital rant.
The signified concept is both the grieving mother's loving memory of her daughter, and
Ai's own use of this phrase in his calls to action. It is this amplification via art and Ai's
unabashed criticism of the government's "villainous" immorality that takes Remembering
out of the decorous criticism of admonishment and into the realm ofjournalistic rabblerousing. Even the materials of this installation are decidedly mundane and seem to
belong more to the world of globalized big box retail than the elite art world. Inspired by
the book bags and other school materials that were strewn around the sites of collapsed
school buildings, Ai employed cheap synthetic backpacks in bright, primary colors. Blue
bags form the background and monumental characters spelled out in red, green, yellow,
and white bags, all eerily pristine and brand new despite their reference to the children's
belongings found in the rubble of collapsed schools. The gesture of appropriating
mundane material culture for installation art is not uncommon, but the uniform newness
of the materials and of-the-moment social commentary overlays Remembering with a sense
of urgency absent in Ai's other work and in the experimental works examined in this
dissertation.
Ai's admonitory impulse is clear, but his means of conveying it is direct and
accusatory. Compared to this approach, Wu's exploration of the visual environment of
the Cultural Revolution takes on a more distinctly historical tone; Zhang Peili's use of the
315 Ai Weiwei, "Paranoid Citizen," 10 May 2009 blog post, translated and reprinted in Ai and Ambrozy, Ai
Weiwei's Blog, 223.
196
meaning-laden symbol of the mirror is also takes on an antiquarian meaning, and Zhang
Huan's patient endurance seems the embodiment of Confucian propriety. Providing
additional historiographical context, SociologistJonathan Unger frames history's role in
contemporary China as follows:
... history was and is considered a mirror through which ethical standards and
moral transgressions pertinent to the present day could be viewed. This
perspective on history was based in Confucian doctrine, which admonished
followers to plumb the past for such lessons. It became a method of commentary
about contemporary times that members of the literatie class learned how to
manipulate, sometimes as a means of flattering an incumbent emperor and
3 16
government - but sometimes as a stratagem for chastising the imperial court.
Where Wu continues this tradition of plumbing the past, albeit the recent past, Ai
abandons this analogical exercise and keeps his work and his message firmly rooted in the
present. He uses the attention that he garners as an artist to transform the gallery into
another medium for promoting an activist message and a search forjustice. As he
commented in his blog, "May those responsible live their remaining years in ashamed
condemnation."3 17
When asked in April 2011 about the recent arrest of Ai, his one-time New York
roommate, Xu Bing deflected all questions with the skill of a diplomat, or, more precisely,
with the tact of the official administrator that he was: "My work doesn't have too much
direct and obvious political content... I really don't know about Ai Weiwei's situation
and I'm not really interested in politics, although I'm certainly interested in the human
condition in general." 318
316Jonathan Unger, Using the Past to Serve the Present: Historiographyand Politics in Conternporary China (Armonk,
M.E. Sharpe, 1993), 1.
N.Y.:
317
Ai Weiwei, "Silent Holiday," 1June 2008 blog post, translated and reprinted in Ai andAmbrozy, Ai
Weiwei!s Blog, 152.
3 18
Xu Bing, quoted in Anderlini, "Apolitically engaged."
197
Xu's sidestepping of direct political content reflects the intellectual formation that
he and his cohort learned in China's elite art academies in the 1980s. The legacy of Cai
Yuanpei and Lin Fengmian remained alive and was rediscovered in the 1980s despite the
rigid official curricula that still reflected the Soviet academic programs geared toward
technical proficiency. The preservation of the Chinese intellectual's role as an indirect
critic and advisor was ensconsed in the first academies, and passed on to these young
artists of the 1980s through the academy system. Their work contains critical and
admonitory content, but couched inside the elite vocabulary informed by the intellectual
plurality of Reform Era China. Ai's 2011 arrest and interrogation, ostensibly for
"economic crimes," cannot be decoupled from Remembering and the blatant and
unrelenting criticisms of specific governmental policies. I believe that his artistic
formation in New York, an environment where new media practices were well
established, contributes directly to his unabashed use of the art to directly convey his
admonitory message rather than to mask it. Where Wu Shanzhuan, Zhang Peili, Qiu
Zhijie, and Xu Bing have been able to re-integrate into the official systems despite their
admonitory themes and critical messages, Ai maintains his overt political identity and has
been censured, intimidated, detained, and physically harmed. While he maintains a
moral stance as the basis of his outspoken criticism, this morality is not tempered by
Confucian distance or the moderated manner of the middle hermit. Instead, it is a moral
invective and as such stands out from the quasi-official circuits of education, publication,
exhibition, and broadcasting that have allowed dissident artists in China to mature into
mid-career professionals invested in their national systems and positioned to effect change
from within. In Reform Era China, there are limits to the extent that intellectuals in all
fields can publicly criticize and admonish governmental policies. Those limits are
198
continually pushed and expanded, but not by Ai and his fiery ekphrastic apparatus that
has resulted in a predictable crackdown and official punishment. The expansion has
come through the quiet criticism of experimental artists like Zhang Peili and Wu
Shanzhuan and their colleagues Xu Bing and Qiu Zhijie. By re-inscribing themselves
within parts of the official exhibition and education systems, their admonitory messages
have become part of the formation of the next generation of Chinese artists. Cai Yuanpei
and Lin Fengmian's nationalistic and utopian goals would seem to have come to fruition,
with the academies helping to develop both aesthetic and ethical consciousness. In the
hopeful words of Cai:
... aesthetic education... produce[s] pure and lofty habits and gradually eliminates
selfishness and the concept of benefiting ourselves through harming others.... If beauty is
universal, there cannot exist within it the consciousness of ourselves as differentiated from
other people. 319
In a 2008 interview, Zhang Peili reflected on his time experimenting with new media as
part of the Pond Society in the years after his graduation from ZAFA, stating that:
now the issues were about the relationship between art and society, between art
and the masses, and these were not problems that could be solved solely through
painting... we no longer considered the end result to be of paramount
320
importance...
Zhang's artistic working method and mediatic experimentation as a means of addressing
the relationship between art and the people resonates with the "lofty" and altruistic goals
of Cai and Lin Fengmian. And it is by infusing his academy curriculum with the
experimental and humanistic goals of his own practice that Zhang and his cohort have
preserved and grown the Chinese artist's role as the "middle hermit" - a sustainable and
continuing role of critic and moralist.
Cai "Replacing Religion,"186.
"Interview with Zhang Peili, 23 November 2008, Hangzhou," Materialsof the Future: Documenting Chinese
Contemporay Artfrom 1980-1990 (Asia Art Archive, 2011) Web video, accessed 16 March 2012.
http://www.china1980s.org/en/interview-detail.aspx?interviewid=52.
319
320
199
Appendix - Key Terms in Twentieth Century Chinese History
Republican Era - 1911-1948
New Culture Movement -19 1Os-1920s
The cultural movement that began shortly after the overthrow of the Qing
dynasty, predicated upon reinvigorating and modernizing Chinese culture with
democracy and science.
May Fourth Movement - 1919 - 1920s
The nationalist political movement, linked to the New Culture Movement, that
grew out of the May 4, 1919 protests at China's unfair treatment in the Treaty of
Versailles, more populist than the elite origins of the New Culture Movement.
Nanjing Decade - 1927-1937
The ten-year period when the Guomindang Party led by Chiang Kai-Shek ruled
China from the capital city of Nanjing.
Yan'an Era - 1936-1948
The period in which the city of Yan'an in Shaanxi Province was the headquarters
of the Chinese Communist movement.
People's Republic Era - 1949-present
Cultural Revolution - 1966-1976
The socio-political movement, set in motion by Mao Zedong, that encouraged
China's younger generation to act as fervent revolutionaries and encourage
Communist ideological puritiy. These Red Guards were charged with
overthrowing all "bourgeois reactionaries" including Party officials and
intellectuals by extreme and violent means. Most schools remained closed
throughout the Cultural Revolution, while large amounts of urban residents were
transplanted to the countryside to perform manual farm labor and undergo "reeducation."
Reform Era -1978 - present
The period of reforming and "opening up" China's economy, initiated by Deng
Xiaoping in 1978, characterized by increasingly pragmatic rather than
ideologically pure policies. Trends include the general decentralization of
industry and the development of a market economy, as well as increasing access to
and contact with the outside world.
200
Bibliography
Archival Sources
Asia Art Archive, Hong Kong
Central Academy of Fine Arts, Beijing
China Academy of Art, Hangzhou
AW Asia, New York
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